don't understand." Here you speak with breath, with vocal cords. The sound of this real, physical voice surprises you.
Your statement receives no response. And then, little by little, a force begins to pull you backward, back through the door leading back to Nevada, back to another world. At first, it's easy to resist, but soon you must drop to your hands and knees, searching for handholds on the floor.
You cannot stay here much longer. If you're to learn anything about this place, it must be now.
If my living, physical voice receives no response, I'll manifest a question using my wraith abilities.
You have so far used your ability to manifest sounds and images to replace your lack of corporeal physicality. Using it now to supplement that physicality strikes you as odd, to say the least.
You feel that, in this place, your aptitude is stronger than elsewhere. You manifest the question "How?" It floods through this great stone cathedral, echoing all around you.
But it is not enough. Though the level of your success has surprised you, you receive no response.
You are lifted off the ground and pulled back through the black door, which slams shut the moment you pass through it. And then you're in Nevada once more—a ghost, luminescent, immaterial. The force with which you are expelled through the door blows you out through the wall of the meeting hall, into the courtyard in the center of the compound once more.
The situation has changed. A helicopter is lifting off above you. Off to one side of the compound—its entrance—you can hear gunshots.
"Meeks, what's happening?" you manage, as you rise to your feet. "How…?"
"Is that you?" snaps Meeks in your ear, the volume of his voice causing the sound from the comm beam to fuzz and distort. "Where have you been? You've been out of contact for nine minutes!"
Nine minutes? Were you in that other place for so long?
"Did you go through that damn door?" Meeks asks.
"Guns," you mumble, moving in that direction now. "What's happening?"
Silence for a few seconds from Meeks. And then he speaks, more calmly than before. "We have local law enforcement backup here," Meeks tells you. "One of their cars strayed too close to the compound. We've been spotted, for sure—it looks like some of the Separatists are planning to move out before we can blockade the place. Does that mesh with what you're seeing?"
It does—jeeps and vans, four of them in total, have pulled up just inside the compound's entrance, and Separatists are climbing into them.
Then, two things take place that worry you. First, one of the Separatists climbs aboard a van carrying the rocket-propelled grenade launcher you saw earlier. The Separatists quitting this place do not plan on surrendering to the police, it seems.
Second, two great gouts of flame rise up above buildings on the far side of the compound. Two of the Separatists, a man and a woman, come sprinting toward the group near the entrance. "Fires are lit!" the woman shouts. "Five, ten minutes—this whole place will go up in flames!"
Whoops of delight and victory at this. One of the Separatists issues a burst of triumphant machine-gun fire into the air.