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He recalled being eaten. Devoured whole by the monstrous form of Banda Toro.

The sudden recollection hit him like a ton of bricks, and he became frantic. He had to get back. Warrenhold was unprotected. Banda was going to rip through it and kill everyone. He had to go back. Wherever the fuck this was didn't matter, right now. He just had to return.

It took him a while to settle down again. And when he finally did, it was mainly because he just didn't know what the hell to do.

No amount of freaking out about it was going to help his situation, it seemed. He was stuck.

He needed to think. Reassess.

So he'd been eaten. But this didn’t exactly look like the inside of a stomach, now did it? And why was there no air, either?

He stood up and looked across the landscape another time, inspecting it more carefully this time, searching for signs of something or someone or… anything at all. Anything for his eyes to latch onto.

But there really was nothing, he soon realized.

It was just flat ground out there, all the way to the horizon.

Well.

Flat iron.

The ground was iron.

Why was the ground iron? And why did it feel like materialized iron? Like his iron?

It was a supremely odd sensation. The familiarity was at once comforting and unsettling. There was SO much iron. Far more than his volume limit would ever allow him to materialize, surely. Even if he achieved emergence a dozen more times, he doubted he would ever be able to create this amount.

Did that mean he couldn’t materialize any more of it in this place? Because he was already capped out?

No harm in trying, he figured. Wasn't like he had any other leads to go on. He raised a hand and tried to summon a cube into it.

And for the second time, he was not prepared for what he saw. Not at all.

A cube did indeed appear, but not by materializing in his hand. Instead, a cube broke itself out of the flat ground in front of him and hovered over at a leisurely pace. As soon as his eyes locked onto it, though, it stopped dead in midair--or mid-space, rather.

It just floated there, suspended above the ground. Waiting.

On him?

For a while, Hector just kept staring at it, too confused to do or think anything else.