Ouroboros

Layer 10, also known as Ouroboros.

After the Intro you'll desend to Embark City.

## Intro

You fall through the void, the stars flitting past you in bright streaks - lines, not points.

You don't have any real sense of how long you fall for, and you suspect it doesn't matter. What does matter is that after an instant, an eternity, and every span of time in between, a circle of color comes into view below you, slowly growing larger. A world opens up below you - are those grassy plains you see? An ocean or a lake, perhaps? Some mountains? It's hard to make out precise details, but it eventually becomes clear that you aren't falling through a void, but through a sky, hanging over a world that stretches far into the horizon. And almost directly below you lies a hole in the earth, and a settlement built beside it.

It's not the same town you departed from. And, at least from looking at it, it doesn't appear to be the same hole you ventured down, either. The color, the trees, the shapes of the rocks - it's all wrong. It's not the same world you knew. You don't know it just yet, but it's an entirely different one, very nearly approximating the world that, at this moment, would be your ideal. Is it a futuristic science fiction world? A world of floating islands drifting across the sky? Fantasy worlds are quite popular right now, so perhaps you'll fall into one of those. This isn't something you'll decide; it will instead be based on your heart's innermost wish. One caveat is that the world you fall into won't be one that goes out of its way to cater to any Curses you have - you won't fall into an entire ocean world just because you're a merperson, or into a world of eldritch beasts just because you've become one. You'll still have to deal with the consequences of your choices, though it is likely that you'll stick out a bit less in your ideal fantasy world than you would have in your old world. You'll notice that any Relics you still owned in the previous world - even ones you left them back in town, or somewhere in the Abyss - will be falling with you, rapidly approaching your destination alongside you. Any companions that made the plunge with you will also be by your side, right now probably yelling something that you can't hear over the air rushing past you.

This world has an Abyss, too. It seems quite different from the one you dove into. Maybe one of the layers is made entirely out of glass, or another is set atop a lake of radioactive, toxic sludge, or one is set in a forest of dead trees, steeped in perpetual twilight. If you've dropped yourself into a world where people are significantly stronger than they were in your world, such as if magic or advanced technology is commonplace, you'll find that this world's Abyss will adapt to that, becoming all the more harsh. It will never be an easy journey. The one constant is that, when you reach the "bottom", you will always find another hole, leading to another new world. The world you fall into now will fit your present whims and desires perfectly, but how many ages will you spend here before you tire and wish for something more, something new? The Abyss will always be here, waiting for you to go deeper, discover more. The only way forward is downward.

As you're gazing down at the Abyss, you catch, just for a moment, a glimpse of the real thing: a snake, unfathomably infinite in length, at once weaving upwards through every reality, "fiction" and non-, "impossible" and possible, and yet at the same time containing all of those realities within itself, as it devours its own tail. All of existence and nonexistence - every chemical reaction, idle thought, cruel word, loving embrace, and lone particle - merely being an exceptionally long, slow, and complicated digestive process, as the Abyss works to break down all of it, including itself. A blind idiot god that, in the same action, creates everything there is...and destroys it. There was never an "outside" of the Abyss, not really. All exists together as and in one serpent.

…and then that moment is gone, and the Abyss is just an adventure-filled hole again.

Don't worry about the landing; you'll slow down before you meet the ground.