Incidentally, a book that had fallen into the nightmare sludge earlier managed to get unintentionally caught up in the rewriting of this dream. It's now floating above both Mitakihara and Derse, larger than life, open with its spine facing upward so that the pages are exposed to the ground. It looks a bit like a pop-up book, and is easily reachable by flight.

The (paper) city of Houston

Every note and detail the book once contained about an ancient dead city is recreated in origami here. Every building, every home, every tree, every baseball stadium (Go Astros), and every highway has been carefully folded together out of the pages of the book, text, pictures and all.

It's nearly silent here, save for the sound of the wind blowing through paper. There are no other people or animals or familiars to disturb anyone who feels a need to hide from the hustle and bustle of the two worlds slowly spinning below it.

There is, however, one building in the center of the city that isn't made out of paper: a single apartment building. It's quiet, and maybe whoever settles down here might feel that loneliness again, but all they would have to do is look up, and they would see plenty of signs of life in the two cities above. Lil Cal is good company, too, hasn't he always been?

[it's by no means perfect. there's a lot more that she wishes she could have done, that she could have given, and now that Madoka is awake and sitting up on her cot in her hut, she wishes she were still asleep so she could have seen it.]

[but, she did the best that she could. sweet dreams, Dirk.]