LEVEL 37

The Poolrooms

Sublimity. White ceramic, blue-green water, and a calm that is entirely wrong.

CLASS 0 — CALM — NO ENTITIES SURVEYED — ACTIVE
Hazards
  • Deep water (drowning)
  • Dark tunnels (no light)
  • Disorientation in still water
Known Exits
Survival Notes
  • The only thing here that can hurt you is the water, and your own confidence in it.
  • Watch your air. There is a meter, and it is not generous.
  • The bright rooms end at the dark tunnels with no threshold. Do not swim into the black.
  • Calm is not the same as safe. Nothing here is chasing you. That is not reassurance.

SURVEY LOG, LEVEL 37 — SUBLIMITY

I do not have a bad thing to report about Level 37, and that is exactly what unsettles me.

Everything is white ceramic tile — walls, floors, the domes of the great pool halls, small square mosaics and large deck slabs and everything in between, glazed and pale and clean in a way nothing else down here is clean. Over most of it lies water, blue-green and warm-lit and impossibly still, so clear you can see the tile continue down beneath the surface into a green dark. The light is soft and comes from nowhere in particular. The air is humid. The sound behaves wrongly — muffled, damped, a drip somewhere resolving into an echo that is too short for a room this size.

It is beautiful. It is the calmest place in the whole structure. It is Class 0 — nothing lives here, nothing hunts here, there is no entity to run from. And every survivor who has come back from the Poolrooms says the same thing, which is that the calm is the trap.

THE WATER

Chambers open into galleries open into domed rotundas, and the floor drops away as you go. The galleries are shallow — a wade, water at the knee, the tile still under your feet. The chambers and the rotundas are deep. A staircase descends off a dry ring of deck into the pool and keeps going, tile all the way down, pillars rising straight out of the water to hold up a ceiling you can barely see. There is no rope. There is no depth marker you can read. You simply find, one step at a time, that you are no longer standing.

The only thing here that can hurt you is the water, and your own confidence in it. Swimming in warm, clear, motionless water in a bright room feels like nothing at all — right up until you are too far from a wall and your air runs low. There is a meter. Watch it. It is not generous, and the water is patient, and it does not care how calm you felt a moment ago.

THE DARK TUNNELS

Against every bright pool hall is its opposite: a tunnel of near-black tile, unlit, that the pale rooms end into with no threshold and no door. One tile is white; the next is dark; the light simply stops. These are the ways deeper into the structure — the exits back up run through them — but you do not swim into the black on a guess. In the bright rooms the water shows you the tile beneath it. In the tunnels it shows you nothing, and the meter still counts down.

SOUND

The whole level is acoustically dampened, as if the water and the tile have agreed to hold sound close. Footsteps land soft and humid. A single drip falls into a still pool and its echo dies too soon. Far away — always far away — water laps against a tile edge, and under everything there is a faint hum of air handling and the gentle resonance of an enormous tiled hall at rest. It is peaceful. Go under and it all lowpasses into a muffled pressure swell, bubble-tick, the sound of being somewhere you should not stay.