People seeing his smile for the first time would say it lights up the room. The more they see it, though, the more that notion fades away. To Jenny Watcher, who'd seen it so long ago, as he watched a building full of people burn down, she'd say it's...

  “Quite an unnerving smile you've got there! What specifically are you looking for about snakes?”

  The man looks at her with a look of confusion. His eyebrows are raised, as if he's searching his mind for some piece of information.

  “Has the world changed that much?”

  “Sorry, what do you mean?”

  The man with orange hair begins to laugh. It's an incredibly lousy laugh, as if it's only the second time he's laughed in his life, and still hasn't figured it out. It's quite unsettling. It seems as if his facial features are moving around his face incorrectly, though they aren't. Suddenly, he stops, and everything seems normal again. He starts to walk away.

  “I saw a really cool snake a while ago. I've been fascinated with them ever since.”

  “Oh, that's cool! I have many pet snakes, I could tell you some things about them!”

  He quickly turns back around. He's smiling again. Jenny notices it looks weirder than the previous time.

  “I’d love that.”

  Jenny has to stop thinking about this, or she'd lose her hold on her form and turn back into a giant snake. She loosely recalls the rest of the events and returns to the present.

  Sherman Chex is sleeping. He has orange hair as well. Though, it's much shorter than the other man’s. Their faces look entirely different, and he looks much younger. They're completely different people, who just happen to both adore snakes.

  It's weird that he's sleeping, though. He was reading for several days straight, and never even yawned. Jenny wonders what he's dreaming about. Well, more accurately, she's wondering if he could ever dream at all. Well, even more accurately, she's not really thinking about him.

  Sherman Chex is having a strange dream. There's a conductor of an orchestra. He’s wearing a vibrant red uniform. As his arms sway and his baton moves around, the orchestra plays the song perfectly. It’s like a well oiled machine. Everyone plays their role absolutely wonderfully. The audience adores them, everyone loves them.

  Though, nobody can see the conductor. Everyone else assumes that everyone else can see the conductor, and as such they play in time with everyone else, rather than playing in time with the conductor. One quick look at where the conductor should be, and there’s nobody there anymore. Everyone else plays their role based solely on what everyone else is doing. It’s as if the conductor never really needed to be there.

  Suzanne is currently running through the caves. Littered around them are a bunch of pieces of boats. There are some boats which are fully repaired, and many which are broken apart. She wonders how they all got down there.

  She eventually finds a very odd wall. It’s made of bricks. She runs straight through it and finds what seems to be a kitchen. The rest of the walls are also made of bricks. She walks through a door out and finds herself in front of a set of stairs. The walls are red, since they’re made of bricks.

  “Who puts stairs into the kitchen? Are they stupid?”

  She takes a grand leap and lands at the bottom of the stairs. The ground is a bit broken where she lands. She opens the door at the bottom and finds herself in a living room. There isn’t a door, but the walls are blue for whatever reason. She picks up the couch and tosses it into a wall. It bounces off. Under the couch is a trapdoor. She opens it and hops down. There’s a ladder she could’ve climbed down but she didn’t do that.

  She finds herself in a driveway. She turns around and sees a house. It’s orange. She’s not a fan. For some reason, when she looks up, she sees both moons in the sky, despite being underground. This is quite confusing. She shakes her head and turns back to the road, which she quickly begins to run down.

  Eventually, she reaches a wall. She places her hand on the wall. It doesn’t seem real.

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  “Why is everyone constantly trying to trap me?”

  She pokes her forehead with her ring finger. The landscape around her is covered in a coat of red. The road is red, the sidewalk is red, the trees are red. The ‘sky’ turns red, and both of the moons in the sky disappear. There’s a hole in the wall. She walks through it and finds her way back into the caves. She sees the tail of a large snake. The snake starts to slither away, quite quickly.

  Suzanne follows the snake and eventually catches up. In fact she’s going faster, and could perhaps make her way to where the head of the snake is. Well, this is what she thinks. Unfortunately, the tunnels are so confusing, intersecting with themselves in multiple places, the snake goes over and under its own body several times, and it’d just be a mess in general.

  Instead of trying to figure all that out, she grabs onto the back of the snake and lets the snake carry her to her destination.

  Jenny Watcher, a few minutes prior, is watching Sherman Chex sleep. It’s incredibly weird and she is incredibly weird for doing it. Fortunately for her, there is nobody to say such to her. She decides to take a step out of the green circle keeping her in the form of a person and take a stroll in her home, the large caves under the continent.

  As she walks out, she turns back into a giant snake, and her body returns to being practically everywhere. It’s incredibly inconvenient. She feels some strange vibrations in the cave, which she realizes is a person running through the caves at incredible speed. Since she’s not in the mood for a confrontation, she exercises her control over the caves and places a wall in front of them.

  The person breaks through the wall, which she’s not quite a fan of. So, she places an entire kitchen in front of them. This leads to a living room, which leads to a fake driveway. It’s the scenery from the set of Jenny’s Town. It’s pretty obviously out of place.

  Unfortunately, the person breaks her way out of the fake road by overriding her control over the cave. There aren’t many people who can do that, so she can narrow down who it may be. Thankfully, that list conveniently includes Suzanne Dars, who’s been in the area recently, so she can very conclusively guess it’s her.

  She sighs internally, and slithers away through the caves.

  Sherman Chex’s dream has changed a bit. This time, he’s dreaming of a scene from the book he just read. It’s strange how he managed to read it so quickly, though.

  In the dream, there’s Rocko. He’s a man with long orange hair, with a red stripe on the left side of his hair that doesn’t seem to move no matter how much his hair sways. He’s floating in a strange empty space. He starts to think to himself as if his life depends on it.

  “As I float in the empty world, I recall where I am. I’m in a space similar to the whitespace. It’s a space where I must tell the story by myself, or I will not exist.

  I notice the lack of usual narration, and understand that this story is not being told. It’s a place where a story won’t continue to exist under normal circumstances. I must be the narrator in this place.

  I see another person standing on something. He looks just like me. He says:

  ‘Who are you? What are you doing in my world?’

  I say back:

  ‘I am just like you, could you help me up?’

  ‘What are you, why are you trying to interfere with me?’

  I don’t understand what he is saying.

  ‘Help me up and I will speak to you.’

  An orange crescent is ripped into the space behind him. I think it looks a little bit like a frowning face. An orange hand comes out of it. It has an orange eye on it, it’s similar to the hand I see in my dreams. The hand picks me up and places me near the man who looks like me.

  ‘Who are you, and why do you look like me?’ We both speak at the same time.

  The strange man answers me first.

  ‘I am a piece sent here to elevate a host.’

  ‘Strange coincidence, I have the same goal.’

  I realize he is just like me. This is incredibly bad. His eyes narrow as he looks at me. For the first time in my life, I think I am scared.

  ‘So we are one and the same.’

  A piece of glass floats from his hand.

  Many appear from my arm. They form a part of my favorite artwork.

  ‘You’ve collected many.’

  ‘I do not know where they come from.’

  I look to the orange tear in the ‘lack of story’ behind him. I look at the orange hand that came from nothing. I look into the eye. I look at its fingers. I look at its palm. I observe the color. I observe the form. I see it. It is looking at me. It is angry with me. I feel like I have failed when I look at it. It judges me. It favors the other. I don’t understand it. I cannot explain it. It is going to kill me. I am scared.

  I think I am about to die.”

  This is Rocko’s final scene in 2521. After this point, he never appears again in the book. He’s replaced with a second, similar orange haired man in the final scene. It’s unclear how the narrator, Allen Dorian, even learns of this to write about it.

  Sherman Chex wakes up and finds himself not where he fell asleep.