The Other Side

The black door

When the Watcher has run his first reel in the Vault, the static in the Door at the End of the World goes black: the dark on the far side of it, looking out. It hums and the air is drawn into it. Walk into it. Going through earns The Other Side.

The stage

You come out through a seam of Black Static in the back of a screen as big as a cliff, ninety-six blocks wide and forty-eight high. Your world plays across it the wrong way round, its light coming through the cloth backwards. In front of you is a stage of pale boards about sixty-five blocks wide. On either side are the wings, black curtains with gaps in them, and over it stands a proscenium arch. Footlights run along the front edge. The Watcher's last projector is at the back of the stage, with him beside it.

The painted flats

Nine flats of scenery stand about on the boards, each one a picture of somewhere from your story in a scene painter's broad strokes, on the side that faces out:

• the Cathedral
• Rosemont
• the Glasshouse
• the Drive-in
• the Bloom
• the Deep
• a house
• the woods
• the Stalls

A flat between you and the Viewer's eye hides you from it. Its hands smash the flats they hit to splinters, so the cover doesn't last.

The edge

Past the front of the stage there's nothing, only a dark so big it has a shape. Fall off and "The dark doesn't keep you. You're back on the boards - it hurt."

Curtain Up

The first time anyone comes through, the camera is taken. Out past the edge there are knees like hills, shoulders up in the black, and hands on the stage's edge with fingers like felled trees. Then an eye opens.

"Keep out of its light - get behind the scenery. When it leans in, hit its eye. Its hands feel it too." Then the fight with the Viewer begins. Cut-out Stand-Ins hop out of the gaps in the wings and point you out to it.

His Last Projector

The projector at the back of the stage is his: "His. He'll run it." Twice during the fight he loads it. At two thirds of the Viewer's health he puts the Omni's Heart in its lamp and throws every colour at once into its eye (advancement Every Colour at Once). At a third, he puts in what's left of the Carrier: your world, carried out on the beam. After that the Viewer reaches for the projector with both hands, and you have to beat them back. At the end he threads his first reel and runs it for the Viewer, and it sits back to watch itself.

When the last show is over, the credits roll and you're sent home with a record, Thank You for Watching. "You're home. Somewhere past the end of the world, a projector's running, and something's watching itself, and will be for ever." The Door's static is static again.

Its blocks

• Black Static: the Door's opening once it's gone black, and the seam home
• Stage Boards, Stage Flat, Painted Flat and Footlight
• The Screen's Back
• His Last Projector

Advancements here

• The Other Side: Go through the Door at the End of the World, its static gone black
• Out of Sight: Get through the first third of the Viewer without it ever seeing you right through
• Every Colour at Once: See the Omni's heart put into his last projector's lamp
• It Gets Up: Be there when what he kept out stands up
• Thank You for Watching: See the last show