THE ENVELOPE: AN IMPROVISED LIVE TEXT ADVENTURE

20.

After resting, you look around for any object of interest. You see that the walls, the ceiling, and the floor all around you are soaked with slimy vomit. An acrid stench stings your nostrils and tongue, and makes you wretch, but your stomach is empty. The dry heaves are painful but not debilitating. You notice that there is a trapdoor several yards further down the tunnel. You stumble towards it to investigate.

The trapdoor's surface is polished, sheeted steel, hammered flat and bolted together. The uneven surface casts off wispy reflections. The door is about 7 feet long and 2 feet wide, with three sturdy hinges on one long side and a huge handle opposite.

You decide to open the trapdoor. It isn't nearly as heavy as it looks, and swings open easily and with hardly a sound. The crashing sound the door makes as it completes its 180-degree trajectory towards the floor is decidedly unimpressive. You note that the trapdoor may be hollow. On the other side is an escalator, its stairs marching steadily downwards into a pitch darkness. It is humming quietly.

Suddenly, you feel a pull in your lower abdomen, followed by an overwhelming need to urinate. You reach to open your pants, but to your surprise, you are not wearing any! With no zippers or flaps to mess with, it is only a quarter of a moment before you are able to urinate on the escalator. The steady arc of urine you cast down into the darkness is pungent and warm. Small droplets mist against your bare ankles as the stream splashes on the escalator's surface. You continue for a long period of time - well over two minutes, you figure. When you are finished, you feel completely relieved. Your spirits are lifted significantly.

After relieving yourself, you unfold the stationery you have been carrying. You count two sheets. One of them is blank. The other has a message written in delicate, spidery handwriting. It reads:

To whom it may concern,

Please forward the accompanying letter to the appropriate party. This is time-sensitive and it is extremely important that it arrives on time!

Do not forget to affix an extra stamp for international delivery.

Regards,
The Management

You fold the letter into a paper airplane and toss it into the air. It travels down the trapdoor and follows the escalator.

You are carrying one piece of carefully folded stationery. It is blank. You are not wearing any pants. You feel good.

21.

You step onto the escalator and ride it into the darkness. A cold draft blowing at you from the depths carries the salty odor of urine. You are familiar with the scent, recognizing it as your own, and it does not bother you.

Before long you are deep within the darkness of a tiny, unlit shaft, with only a cold breeze and the smell of your own waste to keep you company. After your eyes adjust, you realize that the shaft is not as dark as you had first assessed. There is enough waning gray light to faintly illuminate the passage. It comes from the trapdoor far behind you, and, you notice, a distant opening far in front of you.

Time passes, and the escalator carries you through the opening into the brilliant light of day. You note that you must have been underground for much longer than you had thought, because the sun was only barely setting last you checked. As you conclude your thoughts, the escalator comes to an end and sets you at its destination.

You are standing on a very small platform, with only a foot on either side of you and two or three feet in front of you. Waist-high handrails run all around the platform and back up along the escalator into a stone wall. You peer over one side and see the tops of what appear to be massive white cottonballs. You look all around and discover, to your amazement, that you are standing on a tiny platform bolted to the side of a cliff thousands of feet in the air. You guess that you are at least 100 feet above the clouds that normally soar so far above you; you look down a second time, just to make sure. The clouds are, indeed, still clouds, lazily floating along beneath you.

A merciless, icy breeze whips between your bare legs and chills you to the bone. You suddenly feel very uncomfortable. With this discomfort comes the unshakeable suspicion that your miserable little platform will fall to pieces at any moment. The soft hum of the escalator behind you seems to be grinding, now, not humming, like a machine that barely works. You swear that your platform is swaying in the wind.

You realize that immediately in front of you is a massive hot-air balloon. You wonder: how had you not previously noticed it? It is securely tied to your platform with the thickest rope you have ever seen with an impractically complicated knot. The vehicle's basket is made from many layers of intricately-woven strips of wood. The balloon itself, which is fully inflated, is brilliantly colored with stripes of every color you can imagine. Over those stripes are sewn patches of every possible shape in colors that, previously, you could not have even dreamt of. The balloon's sandbag weights are not in the balloon, but all resting on the edge of the platform you are standing on.

You are carrying one piece of carefully folded blank stationery. You are not wearing any pants. You feel good, but are experiencing vertigo.