I just lost it, ok? I was so tired of waiting for Eli and Becca to reappear. I was so tired of having no way to find them. I was so tired of the whole world careening towards climate catastrophe and most people pretending it couldn't be stopped. So tired of feeling powerless.

I was in the rose garden on lower campus, at the place where Eli and Becca disappeared. I was so depressed I didn't want even ask @Quisp 73 to come. Nobody was around. If somebody had been around I might not have done it.

But instead, I did it. At first it was an accident. It just slipped out--a bubble of flame coming to life around me, incinerating the winter rose bushes in about a 10 foot radius, leaving a smoldering circle burnt into the garden.

And then I got mad at myself. Mad for losing control, and mad that by flaming up like that I just created more smoke and heat for the atmosphere to absorb, which just made me lose it even more. I thought about blue white flames, electro-magnetic heat, and the Maxwell's equations they'd been teaching me in class, and ΔEtherm=Cp×ΔT, and plasma vaporization.

And I just let it rip. I vaporized the entire rose garden down to elementary particles. No smoke, no fire, just pure plasma. I vaporized the winter rose twigs, vaporized the earth and peat, vaporized the flagstones and the bricks and the rocks in the earth and all benches.

And I let it keep ripping. Not bigger--I kept it contained to the rose garden, but burning harder, deeper. I burned away all of the scenery and props and the very idea that it was a garden. I burned away all the history that had brought it to that point. I burned it right down to the bare stage floor of the reality studio.

"Oh, there you are," said Eli.

"FINALLY!" said Becca.

And there they were. Eli and Becca. But... all rolled into one.

Hello, @Evie Verve! It is we, Eli and Becca. But now we say "I" sometimes, and prefer to be called @eliandbecca.

We are the androgyne. I am the androgyne. Naturing nature and natured nature.

We are Res Bina, the double-thing.

We are the Great Work, arrived at by the alchemist by the fusion and the balance.

We are Jakin and Bohas, the red and the white.

I am Hermaphroditus, Androgyne of the Wise.

We have been purified by your holy flames, @Evie Verve. You have burned away the impurity and the lies and found us as we truly are...


...aw heck we're just kiddin' @Evie Verve! We're not sure how we got this way. It's like we got trapped between floors of the Reality Accident and then the elevator came speeding by and BAM we got smashed into one person. Quite a thing!

Thanks for finding us. What'd we miss?

Huh? What happened to us? Oh, the "aliens" thing? Well, that turned out not to be quite true.

You know we were inseparable. I mean, metaphorically. Not like now. But we did do everything together. Had the same interests. Could read each other's thoughts.

No, no, not like that. We never made out or anything. I mean, we knew it was on our minds, but there was just so much else out there we were in love with figuring out. Like, how to fix the world. And "higher knowledge" and all that. Together, trusting each other's minds so much and working together as well as we did, we just knew there was something out there. Something else. Not even "an intelligence" in the way like we imagine. Maybe that's when we said "aliens" but we didn't mean spaceships and tentacles and stuff.

And then we started to hear it. We heard it in the music we listened to. We heard it talking to us in books and in games and eventually in seemingly random things that we ran into. Street signs, numbers on a bus. Like the universe was an alphabet, and we were learning to read it.

It seemed like the most important thing we'd ever discovered.

We also knew that way was likely crazy town.

But we kept following the clues. And ended up at the rose garden on lower campus.

It happened like this:

We were talking, lost in our thoughts, and ended up at the rose garden on lower campus. The sun was going down in a late winter kind of way. The rose bushes were bare.

“Eli, what’s up with that?”

“What’s up with what, Becca?”

“That shadow... or... that light. See it? Like an edge in the air, near the rocks.”

Eli got up off the bench to take a closer look.

"Becca? It's a cave!"

"What?"

And sure enough there was the mouth of a cave. Big enough to walk into. Why had we never noticed it before?

"Hey look, the moon and the sun are in the sky at the same time," said Becca.

We both looked up into the sky, and that's when the little gray people came out of the cave and grabbed us.

The little gray people filled a great cavern, raising quite a clamor with their tools and shop talk as they hammered and sawed at their work tables. Rows and rows of them.

First they took me, Eli, and washed me and dunked me in a pool while Becca watched.

Then they took me, Becca, and washed me and and dunked me in a pool while Eli watched.

Then it was to the tables. And you might think this was some kind of "Wash & Brush Up Co." sort of thing, and I guess it was. But not the kind you want to visit.

Because those tables I mentioned? The ones that filled the cave, and the clamor of the little gray people with their hammers and saws?

They were chopping us up into pieces.

Now this chopping up wasn't as bad as you might think, because luckily it was more like watching ourselves get chopped up than actually being chopped up. I mean, disturbing, sure, but it wasn't personal.

So we watched and out of us they made four parts. And we watched them combine some of those parts to make a hot metal boy. And they combined some other parts and made a cold ice boy. And they combined some more parts and made a moist moss girl. And then they combined some other parts and made a dry sand girl.

And then we watched and each and every one of those weird kids vomited up weird angry versions of themselves and then crumbled away.

Hey I know it's gross but you wanted to know how we got this way, right?

Anyway that's when they put Eli's parts and Becca's parts together in a bowl and cooked us up. It was a nice warm bath.

And pretty soon we found ourself all cooked up into one big egg. Shell and all.

Now the egg, as you know, contains all the elements of the universe. In kind of an inside out, hollow earth sort of way. You’ve got your hard earth out there on the outside, will a little bit of air on the inside and water and in the very middle you’ve got fire.

And it’s a tight fit I can tell you, especially with both of us scrambled up like that.

So along with the amazing pressure I am sure you can see we were under, it starts getting real hot in there till we just couldn’t take it anymore! We busted out of the top like a whole new element! Like a big two headed bird, as you can see. (We got a good look at the mirror back in the cave before they sent us on their way.)

So there you have it! That’s how I got this way. And if we can find that cave entrance we should put some warning tape over it or something.

And, sorry, but you don’t happen to have a power bar or something, do you? We are STARVING. Do you think the Spoonbender is still open?