The Center of The Storm (Location)

Fort_Master_Gustav

Gaunt
The scanner fell down into the void, its sillouette got smaller and smaller, until no eye could see it anymore, could this pit be endless? Only a madman would go to the necessary length to discover.
Laying his hands upon door, it somehow feels different than the last one. Less effort is needed, until the door opens, swiveling upon its large hinges and exposing the interior of what seems to be the next cart.
The next cat was mostly occupied with somewhat small white tables that jutted off the right wall of the cart, adjacent to big window panes, and with sets all around it supported by some kind of metallic structure underneath them. The tables were mostly clean, though some still had some pieces of the odd china, or empty glass, or cutlery.
On his left, there was a large structure, glasses of various kinds hanged from a rack behind a counter, coupled with organized bottles of the widest variety, cuttlery, plates, china, stacked, organized, sectioned, and most impressively, clean.
A blink of the eyes of the Nacrusian goes by, and another anomaly appears. Not quite a person, but more of a lack thereof, a warped shadow whose projection betrays the nature of the object, jagged negative outlines configuring a humanoid shape whose hands cusp a glass, and soon follows with a piece of cloth that follows after, rubbing its inside thoroughly.
Its lack of features and distinguishable edges betrays the eyes of the Narcrusian, does it not see him? What even is it?

Gaunt

Fort_Master_Gustav
The Narcrusian paused for a moment, mind racing with questions for the apparition. Who are you? What are you? Why are you here? Why am I here? Where is here, anyway? Of course, he had no reason to believe the image in front of him could or would answer any of his questions. He had to try, though. He decided on the most important question in his mind.

"How do I get home?"

Fort_Master_Gustav

Gaunt
"And thus another one steps through the imiscible facet of interactiveness between this absolute and so many other, fake absolutes. Doomed to the black trains whose linear tracks few escape, perhaps he chases an escape from it? By the very contrary, this being's shattered, newborn mind is riddled with questions, but home is not an easy answer. If you wish to go back to darkness, the pathways is always open, however, to truly find the buzzom of existance, the true home, one must always dwelve deeper."

The figure puts the glass down on the counter and points towards the door at the end of the other wagon. It swings open like a storm and reveals a deep tunnel that stretches long with thunderous gold obscuring a kaleidoscopic mess of clashing waves of color, collapsing in a single point indefinetly far away from its entrance.

Gaunt

Fort_Master_Gustav

That tunnel will take me home? That's easier than I expected, if it works.

The Narcrusian turned in a slow circle, taking in his bizarre surroundings one last time. Strangely, he felt a sudden uncertainty about leaving this place. The wrongness was still certainly present, but at least this place was known, more or less. He had no memory of his home, wherever that was. For no real rational reason, he decided to take a souvenir with him. He crossed the room to the rack of bottles, inspecting them and grabbing the fanciest-looking one. Then, bottle in hand, he ran and leapt into the tunnel.

Fort_Master_Gustav

Gaunt
"It's in the depths of one's soul that some of the final misteries are solved."

The figure says, before the Narcrusian steps through the portal. He is suddenly submitted through an enormous force, as if it was dragging on the surface of his skin tremendously and peeling it off, exposing a core so deep even the Narcrusian, in his confused mind, couldn't pinpoint the location of.
His vision was stretched wide as if submitted through the a fisheye lenses, as behind himthe door closed shut and dissapeared. He was falling and gathering tremendous speed, and falling to a place he did not know. The sides stretched and distorted as he advanced towards the kaleidoscopic end, piercing through this tenuous imiscible layer.
A figure advanced through from the way ahead. It was the image of an inverted black pyramid, piercing through this golden storm as it made itself closer, and the Narcrusian fell through into it, swallowed by an endless darkness.
Until he woke up.

He wakes up in a pool of what seems to be some kind of shallow water, contained by white, if not very old marbles. He can feel the wetness of the liquid touching his body, perhaps the first time he himself felt it, it is somewhat pleasent and unplreasent at the same time.
Opening his eyes further, he sees that surrounding the pool are three statues of old humanoids dawning great robes that cover most of their bodies. At the stand of these statues, there are engravings of certain words.
Looking around more, he seems to be in some kind of cave. The place is only lit by a fire that hangs above this pool, casting dark shadows that stretch, and obscuring the edges and walls of whatever place he may be in.

Gaunt

Fort_Master_Gustav
The first thought that went through the Narcrusian's head as he sat up and surveyed his surroundings?
This isn't home.

He climbed out of the shallow bath and rose to his feet, uniform sticking to his skin and dripping water back into the pool. So the tunnel hadn't worked. The figure had lied. That's fine. Just a setback is all. The end goal of getting home hadn't changed, he just had to re-establish the means of reaching that goal. He couldn't see any obvious ways out of the cave, but maybe there were clues somewhere. The engravings on the stands of the statues might be a place to start, he thought, bending down to read them.

Fort_Master_Gustav

Gaunt
Kneeling down to look at the engravings, he could see that the crude glyphs were on a language he could understand, and at the same, were also somewhat shifting in meaning, in fact, everything seemed to emanate this bizarre shimmer, though it barely did anything, almost as if it was being contained by the form it had assumed.
Nevertheless, the three engraving pieces read:

Here lies forever, The King.
... thus we can conclude that the world is endowed with soul and intelligence, conversing with us in such facets as we converse and live within it. The attempt to separate all existances from one another is barbarism and utterly...

..it is for them whose pure form reigneth to return to the cave and unmistify the projected lies, for they saw the golden light that bathes and reveals, and they knew both themselves and the truth thereof.

...that man is made twice: One in gold and one in mud. And that the gold converses with the truth as it beckons and responds, and that the mud taints the dialogue thereof. Only that of which learns to purify itself can not only live within the world, but make the world live within him. Those that...

Gaunt

Fort_Master_Gustav
He punched the engraving, accomplishing nothing except hurting his knuckles. This wasn't a clue, this was meaningless drivel. He stood.

There had to be something else here. He just wasn't looking closely enough.
He picked up one of the marbles from the pool and turned it over in his fingers, not sure what he expected to find but knowing there had to be something.
He ran his hand over every inch of the statues, the pedestals, the walls of the cave, the floor, looking for a hidden button, a trapdoor, anything.

Gaunt

After checking every possible surface, he collapsed before the statues. There had to be something here. There had to.

_...whose pure form reigneth... ...one in gold and one in mud... ...golden light that bathes and reveals... ...bathes and reveals... ...learns to purify itself... purify... bathes and reveals...

Suddenly, he understood. Or maybe he was deluded, and clutching at straws.

Climbing back into the pool, he washed away the mud and dissolved.

Fort_Master_Gustav

Gaunt
As the Narcrusian, wether by intuitiveness or by divine intervention, understands the situation laid before him. And with that, a lighting of information surges through this mind: If that is to be a truth of his being, perhaps of every being so, how many hidden truths about the universe are isolated, unnoticed by the folly of the maddned drive of the science of men? The hivemind would be baffled by this.
He elevates his hands and washes himself within this, and soon, he is undone. This is a sudden and progressive change, he feels his being unforming, as if he was once a monolithic stone, the water clashed against him, and in a millenia made minute, the stone undeed itself to a vast ocean with depths barely explored.
He opened his eyes again, and thus, everything was changed. He was in a large plain, surrounded by large mountains, and a sun that shone down and liberated the shimmer that was seemingly contained beforehand, truly a beautiful sight. The same statues were seemingly gone, rather, replaced by fuzzy outlines, they were standing still, watching them without saying anything.

Gaunt

Fort_Master_Gustav
He turned in a slow circle. This was no surprise to him. By this point, he was used to this.

He strode a few paces, putting the three figures behind him.

Without turning to face them, he waved, his hand, gesturing for them to speak.

Fort_Master_Gustav

Gaunt

That proved to be an impossible task, as every step that he took farther away from the center of the pool, it seemed that the sides of the pool stretched accordingly, rendering his movement simply non-existant, almost as if he was literally walking in place.
The figures reacted, in his absense of attention they had grown in size, however that was just the start. From their frontal facets that faced him, almost as if they had knifes in the hands and gouged such out, three shapes came into existance. One was a parabola upwards, one downwards, and one combined the two, almost as if it formed an eye of immense darkness. This eye cried down the darkness, and it quickly spread all throught the ground, and the ground was swallowed by darkness as the skies were obscured by whiteness, thus the land morphed.
The Narcrusian was now standing upon a large triangular platform made out of some homogenous black material which felt somewhat cold to his touch, after all, he was as naked as one could ever be. These three symbols stood upon each of the corners watching over him, and soon, the one with the dark eye spoke.
"Its" speech was not as much as words, but rather, an incoherent symphonic mess of grey noise and other phonetic bits that spiked and lowered at seemingly low intervals, it didn't as much speak as it somehow surged through the mind of the Narcrusian, surpressing his own thoughts in the process. The Narcrusian however, could not understand anything that was said, this language was alien enough to surpass such definitions.
Then, almost as if the blackened platform undid itself underneath his feet, he fell, as the darkness and whiteness contrast could be perceived as a difference, either a presence of the material, or the lack thereof. He fell once again through to the darkness and he dreamt of identities of a far-gone past, or perhaps future?
He saw a black outined eye with a black iris surge over a crowd of different beings, it opened a rift into the nothingness like a sort of burning fire never seen before, and from within its iris shone a light of indiscribable luminescence, and before that light all the beings bowed down and undid themselves into hazy outines, finally disolving into nothingness.
He saw a giant of brass rise above an infinite plane of gold, towards him the wonders of men beckoned, his hands stipulated a maxim, a relation between the above and the below, and the geometry of a triangle surged naturally from such maxim.
He saw the universe made into the palm of his hands, all the sparkle of the cosmos shining through. It got smaller and smaller until it undid itself, sucking him into it with strength and sending him to another vision as he pierced the infinitesimal barrier between what is real and what may be a fabrication of his own mind in this delusional state.
He wakes up.

He seems to be inside of the escape pod he was in whence he got sent into this phenomena. Looking outside the viewports, he can see that he orbits somewhat far away from the gigantic golden accretion disk, with little danger of falling inwards.
The hivemind seems quiet, however, it is like there is this small pressure on the back of his mind which won't go away, as if it was trying to burrow its way into his mind but failing to pierce something, something he could not describe, perhaps yet, perhaps never.
On his right hand there seems to be a bottle of some kind of drink, did he really manage to squeeze that one out of this bizarre place?
In front of him, there is a note, a note that wasn't there beforehand but that now is:

Gaunt

The Narcrusian sat in the pod, reading and re-reading the note. He considered the last line. The epicenter of the folly of men. He had no idea of where that might be, although the idea of a center to the inhabited galaxy seemed oddly familiar.

He didn't have much time to think on it before a much larger ship appeared in the escape pod's porthole, an ominous cubioid striped in diagonal yellow and black lines. It was vaguely familiar, but he couldn't pinpoint why. A moment later, the pod's built-in communicator crackled.

Life forms have been detected on this pod, but there are no Narcrusians aboard. Please identify yourself and explain why you're piloting UNFT property.

He paused. UNFT. Narcrusian. Just like the ship itself, those words felt familiar but he didn't know what they meant. And identify yourself. What did they want? A name? The mere concept of a name seemed foreign to him. He held the communicator button, and spoke shakily into the microphone.

"I was hoping you'd be able to answer that for me."

He sat some time later in a communal sleeping area aboard what he'd been informed was a UNFT freighter. The UNFT had a lot of communal spaces, which made sense for a hivemind with no concept of privacy or personal space. He did dread having to use the bathroom, though.

He'd been informed by what was apparently a hivemind named Narcrus that he used to be a part of them, before he was sent into that wormhole they called The Storm. He'd disappeared for multiple standard days, long enough for Narcrus to almost give up on his return, before reappearing on the other side of the wormhole, in the same pod he went in with, with the addition of a strange note and that bottle he'd taken, labelled "Lagavulin Islay Single Malt Scotch Whiskey". Narcrus had immediately determined it was alcoholic, and therefore unsuitable for Narcrusians to drink, but it had still been whisked off for chemical analysis.

Narcrus didn't have much insight on the content of the note, except for the fact that "The epicenter of the folly of men" might mean a place called the Embassy, which was where they were going now. It'd be a little while before they arrived, though. Narcrus had explained that they had a method of travelling very quickly called "hyperspace", but the Embassy was protected by something called "interdiction", which stopped that method from working, and Narcrus had to contact them so they'd let them through faster. It was all beyond his understanding, but the bottom line was that it'd take a few minutes to get them to the Embassy. Not that they knew what to do once they were there, the Embassy was apparently a very large place, too large to find one person in. Narcrus had assured him that he knew who they were looking for, but they hadn't sounded very confident in themselves.

You have reached the Embassy. Please identify yourself and state your intentions.

Narcrus sighed. They were beginning to doubt their own plan. Regardless, they replied.

I'm Narcrus. 
I'm escorting a friend of mine, who believes they've been invited for an audience with the Ambassador.