[b]Observatory.[/b]
A sliver of good fortune had positioned Innocent beside the brasswork-bearing table in the same direction that the floor swung, giving him something to hold on to. Though his feet slipped out sideways between the table legs, he caught himself at a kneel and braced against the floor. There he stayed a few seconds, head spinning, not sure if the floor was stable of if they would all keep tipping sideways until they fell through the roof, or perhaps through the roof and up into Heaven. Sidwell's dreams hadn't prepared his expectations well for a place so surreal.

Standing up to the complaints and questions of his fellow dead, he readjusted his hat silently, feeling numb. [i]Perhaps I have run through my stock of shock,[/i] he thought, bringing down his hand to find a wisp of silver-grey resting on it in perfect, contagious calm. [i]...And for what sin did you need to fall from grace, little angel?[/i] The insect avoided the question, flitting back upwards and onto the brim of Sidwell's hat where so many others had rested in the past.

A sound of knocking wood tugged his attention back to the room. Zosime had put her attention back to the pillar, but Christopher was tapping on the floor like a door. Listening in as closely as he could, Sidwell could hear what Christopher had picked up on before him, though of course, he did not recognise the voices. [i]Many die and few go straight up, so it's a small wonder that the grave is crowded,[/i] he explained to himself, but did not stoop down to listen to the floor. The voices could wait until he found their owners, wherever they were.

Innocent had only explored part of the room around the pillar, and with two of the other three wakeful lost in their own worlds of exploration (The boy still seemed to be fiddling with his dull black jewellery; The poor fellow was likely stunned by shock), he thought it appropriate to follow suit. The books in the walls were, as Christopher had shown to his frustration, adjoined to their shelves, and to try and remove them himself when Christopher had already tried felt like it would be a slight against all his effort. Besides, there was an odd, shifty quality to the vines that he didn't like, as if they were crawling around when they knew he wasn't watching. Sidwell left them be and continued to the far side of the pillar, where a door waited for him. He knocked, to no reply other than the snapping of some leaves on the wood, which smelled familiarly of strawberries.

Facing the pillar again to address the others, perhaps ask their thoughts on opening this door, Innocent's eye caught on a gleam in the dark on the top of the pillar device. The shape was too small and distant to make out easily until it moved, and Sidwell squinted at it. A little tailed animal, perhaps a rat, glinting like the flutterby on his hat and just as still. He let go of the doorknob he didn't realise he'd been holding, but the animal was too far to reach, and Sidwell was not a cat, that he could climb up and look for it. Still distracted, he put his hand back on the doorknob, neglecting to use Latin when he stated that "...I am going to open this door and see what's outside."

The door opened with more of a wooden creak than a hinged metal one, and dull light shone in, dazzling the night-eyes he'd been using since he awoke. The scene was a mangle of conflicting elements. The leaves and vines in his awakening room were a shadow of what he saw here. The ground was almost completely overgrown with roots, and trees were rising. This wasn't a forest, though, for at the edges of it all was a railing, and beyond that railing, seething grey. It took landlocked Sidwell several seconds to recognise the movement as water, unholy amounts of water that stank of salt and mysteries.

"Et dedit mare mortuos qui in eo eran." [i]And the sea gave up the dead that were in it.[/i] From the Apocalypse of Saint John, from the very end of life and the Good Book. Sidwell didn't take his eyes from the water as he walked down to it, nearly tripped by the stairs between the deck and the domed observatory. His hands clutched the railing and he watched the sea, unafraid of the mute idiot mass of water crawling below him. He was dead, and had nothing to fear from this natural world.

The sound of tears didn't reach him for quite some time. Innocent turned his head without averting his stare from the water until he caught sight of a human figure in the periphery of his gaze. His rapture broke and his tense body slackened back into small, humble Sidwell. The woman was kneeling in front of a fox, talking in distress, mourning her lost child to it. [color=7bcdc8]“...Soso sorry, baby... I didn't mean to get you killed. I'm so sorry...”[/color]

Wavering, he stepped a little closer and spoke, unsure of exactly what he was interrupting. "Forgiveness comes to all good souls," he offered, trying to compensate for the regret the woman was clearly showing. [i]No doubt this was the sin which she rests in Purgatory to pay off.[/i]