Orb and the Tetrahedrons [part 5]

–       Acceptance is a matter of alternatives. Orb, let me rebubble what I viewed once in a cerulean room’s projection:

Don’t take the right path without us.

Without us it is

The most wrong of all.

Don’t cut yourself off from us!

We can go astray and you can be right, so

Don’t cut yourself off from us!

That the short path is better than the long one cannot be denied.

But if someone knows it

And cannot point it out to us, what use is its wisdom?

Be wise with us.

–       Don’t let yourself be spun too fast. Cerulean rooms tend to be spaces of inner instability. And the path…. The path is a long one. If you do not want to be cut off from me, if you do not want to be cut off from all the other bodies, you will simply have to follow my glide.

After much bubbling with the other 37 Tetras, once caught up orangely in their sublime inscriptions then drifting to the argument between Pab and Orb, at long last a dozen decides to glide after them back into the treacherous outside rooms.

>>

Their outwards drift becomes a protracted struggle. Wherever they meet other crystals and begin to bubble their cause, that of being allowed to inscribe in every green room and to stop the “grey-burgundy anomaly” [their term for the desecrating ritual], they are met with either indifference, hostility or outright persecution. It are the Cubes and Octahedrons that feign detachment. One of the Octas they come across in a yellow room, surrounded by two identical comrades, bubbles:

–       But ayh, just view yourself, floating about in such a rabble of fourteen bodies. Chipped, probably from too much contact. Naturally nobody will attend to such troublemakers. Don’t force us to permit your follies, there are enough projections as it is. Have you viewed them all? Have you emoted to the best of your abilities? Simply because you are envious of our status as Cubes and Octahedrons does not give you the right to bubble such preposterous ideas! As your time is not yet here, you would be better off following the old dictum: be patient and all good things will come to you. Patience, you view?

Even when they present them with the evidence of crystal shards and ask them how they as Cubes and Octas, imagine they have acquired such completely asymmetrical faces, these bamboozled bodies do not budge from their adherence to the status quo of all the rooms there are. Orb, feeling the force of number in its favor and wanting to atone for earlier short comings, smudges both of them.

>>

The Icosahedrons are a different lot. When approached by the wild fourteen they just haughtily glide away into another room, rarely even going to the degree of bubbling any type of invective. This strategy is facilitated by gliding through Icosahedronal portals. However, quite a few of them return stealthily at a later point in time, glowing Trapezohedras following them to wreak havoc on the straggling bunch of Tetras and Orb. In this way they end up loosing four of their number across twenty-five score rooms.

But in all actuality it are the Dodecas which are the real brutalitarians. They take any negative information about Icosahedrons as a direct offence to their own geometry as well. Dodecahedrons have a secret system of call-and-response by which they quickly amass into packs of thirty, fourty, fifty bodies and go chasing after the asymmetrical outcasts, trying to crush them between each other or fix them in space until they can get one or two Trapezos to finish off the job. Three more Tetras are lost in this way, which discourages the floating, displaced bodies.

–       Ahyoooh, we cannot go on like this Orb. There might be other possibilities, no? View us: we are getting split to nothing. Simply adding insult to injury to elimination. Nothing good will float up from this insurrection of ours.

–       Let us try the short path then. You viewed that it might be better and I would project that you are correct.

Carefully avoiding all their fellow shapes they make their way to the Cosmic Latte room where Orb had blackly enrubbed the map of all rooms it had glid through in its time. It is still there with the circle at its center, the annular shape that all passing crystals certainly have taken to represent troublesome Orb, the difficult one, which it is not.

_  [ t. b. contnd]