"Null? Are you awake?"

I wake up to the sound of Noah's voice, surprisingly concerned about something. Waving an antenna in his general direction, I mumble tiredly, [Go away, Noah. I'm sleeping.]

He shakes me a bit. "Null! You've got to wake up! You've been asleep for like two months!"

Standing up abruptly, I nearly fall over. Since when were my legs so weak? [What... what happened? I can't have been asleep that long!]

Noah looks actually worried about something. "You sure as heck have! I dunno what happened, somebody cast a sleeping spell or something - it's been forever!"

Looking around, I check on Alice and Baby, who seem more or less all right. They're dozing peacefully, grass growing over the planks of the skyship and crawling up their boots.

I hate to admit it, but Noah has to be right. There's no way grass could grow this much in such a short time. [Can we track down the cause of whatever happened?]

[Mmm... go back to sleep, Null. I'm so tired...]

I seize on the voice desperately. [Joule? Joule, is that you? Are you all right?]

Her voice sharpens. [Wait, how are we on the ground? We haven't been flying that long...]

Noah's eyes are full of... no, not fear. He doesn't feel fear. "Null, it's seriously been over two months. I don't know what happened, or how it happened, but I couldn't get back into the universe! Something was blocking me, something really powerful. Like stupid powerful. I think it might have been that spider, but he couldn't do that before! I don't know what would have changed, unless he gets more powerful with experience or something. But it's not like that site gives levels or anything for writing more..."

He trails off, clearly distressed about something, and I head over to the others. Nudging Baby with a mandible, I slam my thoughts into his mind. [BABY! Wake up!]

The big man's eyes snap open, and he lurches forward with a bleary grunt of confusion. "Whaa... whazz going on?"

Turning away from him, I gently nip Alice's tail, and she leaps straight up into the air with a yowl. "HEY! What was... whoa."

I nod in response, spinning back around to Noah. He's got a small matrix of something I can't quite look directly at hurtling every direction at the same time inside his palm, and he's staring at it with a frown. "This... this doesn't make any sense. Like, even by my standards, this doesn't make any sense."

Glancing up at me, he says simply, "I need to go and figure some stuff out - this isn't good at all. See you in a while, hopefully."

And he's gone.

Turning back to Baby and Alice, I wait for Joule to erupt from my body and solidify, and then ask, [What do we do now?]

Yawning, Alice asks, "Wait, so what's going on?"

I turn my head in her direction, antennae wriggling. [I don't know. Apparently time stopped for two and a half months.]

Joule's head whips in my direction. "Sorry, what!? How did you say that so casually? That's a huge deal!"

Baby leans forward anxiously. "Time just... stopped? I thought Noah wasn't going to mess with anything."

[Noah says he didn't have anything to do with it, and that something was blocking him from entering the universe.]

There was a very long silence, one that I waited to end.

Finally, Joule asks in a rather strained voice, "There's something even Noah can't beat?"

Another silence.

Baby's face was blank as he very calmly spouted off a long string of increasingly creative words, none of which I knew the definitions of. None of us make a sound, mentally agreeing with the tirade. When it ends, he adds, "So, to clarify, Bubbles is missing, the dragon is missing, time was stopped for a really long time, and of course there's something Noah was having trouble getting around. I think we can all agree that we're pretty much screwed."

Nobody disagrees.