Sandy squinted and held his hand up to shield his eyes - which felt as though they hadn't been opened for a long, long time - from the all too bright light. "At least there is light," he muttered to himself as he fumbled for his glasses. They were nowhere to be found, at least by pawing his hands around. Most of what he could see was a grey blob. He knew he wasn't home. His apartment was more colourful than this by a long shot. "Does that mean I'm still in the Guild?" He tried to remember what had happened to him. There had been an argument... This wolf had come out of the forest and was claiming to be the god of this world... His head hurt. He couldn't really concentrate. But it was no use. He couldn't remember any other details other than this: Muse, the man who had brought him there had called the thing that was speaking through the wolf 'Ex.' "Ex." He muttered the name aloud, wondering if there was a story behind it.

With one more desperate grope, Sandy's hand grabbed something solid. A table. On it were his glasses. He donned them and took a moment for his eyes to adjust, as the world came into sharp focus around him. As he got a better view of his surroundings, he realized something. He'd woken up in a cell.

Again.

The memory of what had happened the previous day came sharply to focus, as though it had been a dream turned very real. Including what Muse had said about reality being... malleable. That in order to change something, one had to believe what he wanted to change was already changed, to commit that belief to heart and mind. A daunting task for a skeptic like Sandy. Not one he could manage at a moment's notice like this. And yet, when he tried the door, it wasn't locked. [i]Strange,[/i] he said to himself. Even stranger though, was the fact that when he opened it, it opened not to a building or any interior space. Instead, it had opened onto water, about three meters above the surface. Not too high to jump if it was deep enough, but enough to be intimidating.

But if he did jump, there was no boat, no place to make landfall in sight. He'd be in the water for a while... At least long enough to swim to the next setting. He wasn't sure how long that would take. But he had no choice, and he knew it. With only a moment's more hesitation, he dove. With nowhere else to go, he started swimming, determined not to change his course until something changed.