T-022 The hanging moment

Threshold Institute · Case file T-022

Number

T-022 in the catalogue

Kind

Place

Class

Class III: no cell holds it for long

Found

Year 26, month 4, day 21

Where found

A roofless ruin at the edge of the grey flats, and since then in other ruins beyond T-001

Status

Uncontained

Now

In the rift

Part

Part III: Going through (the places and creatures)

Containment procedures

The hanging moment cannot be contained. A room where it holds is crossed slowly and in single file, with nothing swinging from the belt and packs closed. No surveyor touches the hanging debris. No shot is fired into, through or across such a room. A survey that must fight near one moves the fight away from it first. A room where the debris has fallen is logged as spent, but not as safe: the second survey to enter the first such room found it hung again.

Description

Places in the ruins beyond T-001 where debris hangs frozen in the air: plaster, glass, stone and timber held at every height, still as a photograph, with dust stopped among them. A lamp's beam passes through without a flicker. Unlike a slow bubble (T-019), there is no hum and no lens at the edge, and a hand moves through the room at its normal speed. The debris is not slow; it has stopped. Touched or shot, a piece falls again, and anything it strikes on the way falls with it, so that one shot can bring down a room in a single long crash.

Discovery

The seventh survey, under Tomas Rehn, found the first one in a roofless ruin at the edge of the grey flats (T-021), five months after the upward rain. Rehn's first thought was a slow bubble. He walked in himself, with a line to the door, and found that he moved as he always did. Surveyor Lina Dahl brushed a shard of glass and it fell, and only it. Then Rehn asked for a test from a distance.

Addenda

Addendum T-022-1

incident log, Year 26, month 4, day 21

Time 1. Surveyor M. Kask fires one round from the doorway into the broken beam at the room's centre, on T. Rehn's order, to test whether a shot frees the debris as a touch does.

Time 1, at once. The beam falls. The shards and plaster it strikes on the way fall with it, and the pieces those strike, until about half the room has come down. The crash lasts some seconds and carries across the flats.

Time 1, a minute after. Calls of rift stalkers (T-002) heard from the spires to the north. Rehn orders the team out of the ruin and back toward held ground.

Time 1, eight minutes after. Two stalkers seen at the ruin's door from two hundred paces, searching. They do not follow the team.

Addendum T-022-2

note by T. Rehn on the file

For two years the surveys have moved quietly through the land beyond T-001 and met little worse than stalkers. One shot and a crash brought two of them in minutes. The hanging moment is less a trap than a held breath, and it is the noise of its falling that does the harm. I recommend that the manual treat it as a sound hazard first. I have also asked that we learn how far sound carries out there, and what it brings.

What followed

That autumn a team learnt how far, and how much (see T-023).

Previous fileT-021 Upward rainPart III: Going through (the places and creatures) Next fileT-023 Listening fieldPart III: Going through (the places and creatures)

In the file

• People: Tomas Rehn, Lina Dahl and M. Kask.
• Places: The land beyond the rift.

In the game

The note you find in the game:

Year 26, month 4, day 21. Found by the seventh survey under Tomas Rehn in a roofless ruin at the edge of the grey flats, five months after the upward rain. Rehn took it for a slow bubble and walked in on a line to the door, but moved as he always did; then the surveyor Lina Dahl brushed a shard of glass in the air, and it fell, and only it.

Roofless ruins beyond the rift where a collapse stopped halfway down. Four were charted there, none near where a traveller arrives. Over about a quarter of each floor, slabs of roof, beam ends and clusters of brick, glass and tin hang in the air above their own shadows; the doorways and the floor beside them are clear. Whatever walks under a piece sets it off, people, creatures and animals alike, and so does a bullet or an arrow whose flight crosses it, which flies on, or a blast within reach. It falls at once, in a quarter of a second, and hits the chest about as hard as a pistol round. The crash is heard some 15 tiles off and brings down the pieces hanging beside it.

A fallen piece lies as rubble that can be walked over, and by the next visit every piece hangs again. No bedroll can be laid out inside such a ruin.

Status: uncontained. The moment sets itself again, and no map shows them.

Today it is found in the rift.

Watch T-022 The hanging moment on YouTube