The Teeth Pit and the Floating Islands

What it is

A realm with no ground and no sky: green fog all the way down, spores and flies in the air, a wet drone and things far off (a groan, something chewing, a scream cut short). Hanging in it is everything the great flower has eaten, overgrown with its flesh, dripping vines and glowing pustules. Since 1.27.2 the fog thins out to 240 blocks, so you can see a long way, and from any edge you look straight down into the Great Bloom's throat.

Far off in the green you might hear a child laughing (and then again, slowed, wrong), someone sobbing, a music box running down, a radio, knocking from inside something, a scream played backwards. Out on the islands you sometimes hear the Bloom calling from far, far down under you.

The islands

Each has a chest and a lectern with its story.

The Binding's island

Where you come out. The stone in the middle is the Binding, chained, its sigil and the cracks in it glowing. The plaque on the lectern beside it is from the Laboratory. See below.

A street of Rosemont

A torn-open pharmacy, wrecked cars, a bus stop, a traffic light, and a road bridge snapped off over nothing. Its lectern holds the Rosemont Courier, four issues folded together.

The research station

The research station (Dr. Marsh's log says the flower ate the Laboratory's east wing): its lab, the burst specimen tank, benches of specimen jars, and a copper duct for a bridge. Its lectern holds Dr. Marsh's research log on Specimen 0.

Shelter No. 4

A concrete bunker full of bunks, sunk in its island with roots through the roof. Its lectern holds the shelter warden's log.

All four papers are on the lore page.

The pit

Below everything is the Great Bloom. Its mouth is wider than all the islands together, and every island hangs over it. A lip of flesh, then a throat ringed with ring after ring of hooked teeth that turn against each other as it chews, a sick light far down in it, and at the very bottom a pool of its acid. Its throat has faces in it, pressed out through the flesh, mouths open. Round it rise eight tentacles like towers.

Don't fall. A tentacle twenty blocks thick comes straight up out of its throat under you, coils round you and drags you down into its mouth. Since 1.38 you go down alive, into its stomach.

The air

Without the Gardener's Weeds (the full set) you're infected the moment you arrive, and after twenty seconds it starts eating you, slowly and then faster ("The air in here is eating you. Without the Gardener's clothes you are rotting."). The edges of your sight go green-black and veined, the veins pulsing with its heart and creeping further in the longer you stay. Something whispers just behind you, wherever you turn. Now and then, for a blink, you see its mouth. In his clothes, the flies settle and lift off again.

The Binding

Touch the stone with an empty hand: "The chains strain. Far below, something stops moving. Touch it again to break the Binding." Touch it again and it breaks. The Great Bloom goes mad, the ground quakes, a choir of screams swells up backwards, your heart pounds faster with the countdown, and its tentacles come up round the island and take hold. Ten seconds ("THE RIFT! 10") to get back through. Then the island's edges break away and it pulls the whole island into its mouth, rift and all ("The rift is gone. There is no way back now.").

When you come out, the Great Bloom comes up the root and through the glasshouse. See chapter three.

The ledge

In chapter four the Watcher tears the risen Bloom open and the rift comes out on what's left of the Binding's island: a torn slab of its ring hanging over the colossal Bloom's mouth, its tentacles hanging over it. At the far end is the Launch Mark, where the Rosemont Device goes. See the launch.