Chapter Text
INT. RELATIVITY
A stone castle stairwell. ROS and GUIL land hard. After a stunned moment, they reach out their hands, eyes tightly shut, until they've identified the floor, their own heads, and each other. Given that initial reassurance, they sit up and check themselves for injuries, then look around.
They are in a vast, echoing atrium. Stairways around the room run in multiple directions, some of which are impossible. Archways and landings add structure, but not order. Windows look out onto courtyards at different times of day, gravitational orientations, and possibly planets. In the center of the space, dust motes dance in a sunbeam, a two story drop in any possible direction.
ROS and GUIL inch backward to wedge themselves against the nearest wall.
ROS: I suppose you're going to tell me not to try walking around.
GUIL: (closing his eyes in despair) I wouldn't dream of it.
ROS looks in various directions, trying to sort out the space, but does not move. GUIL eventually opens one eye to look at him.
GUIL: Well?
ROS: Yes. Very well.
GUIL closes his eyes again.
ROS: You can't just always rely on me for this sort of thing. Good old whats-his-name, he'll go poking around at things. I won't stand for it!
GUIL: They're trying to distract us.
ROS: You're trying to change the subject.
GUIL: I — I do my share. Listening at windows and — and so on.
ROS: And so on.
Both of them stay wedged against the wall.
ROS: It's not like it's even that complicated —
GUIL: Yes, all right. (He gets to his feet. He bounces on his toes. Gravity continues to hold.) There. We've just got to keep our grip, that's all. Try not to land on our heads.
ROS stands and follows him. They start down a stairway, each keeping a hand on the wall. Soon they get confident and go briskly down two flights.
ROS: What if it just doesn't stop?
GUIL: Everything stops. That much, we can count on.
They arrive at the next landing, which hangs over the void.
GUIL: Case in point.
GUIL kneels and looks over the edge, assessing the wall below. He reaches down, gripping to test for handholds.
ROS is distracted by a small hovering light in the air, flitting on transparent insect wings. The light zips around the corner, revealing that the landing was twice as wide, with a stairway on each side of the wall. He chases it up and around another corner.
ROS and GUIL, in plain black suits, walk along a corridor, chatting. ROS has an earring and lank brown hair to his shoulders. GUIL has a Jheri curl, a horseshoe mustache, and impressive sideburns.
ROS: Nah, man. He called 'em leaks.
GUIL: Leaks.
ROS: Said they were portals to other dimensions, and you were actually looking at an alternate version of yourself.
GUIL: Like Bizarro World or something?
ROS: Something like that.
GUIL: Dude was reading too much Alice in Wonderland, sounds like.
They ponder this.
ROS, following the hovering light, finds himself face to face with HAMLET, a short, boy-faced elf with a sword slung over his shoulder. HAMLET is oddly smooth, and his shadows do not match the local lighting. He constantly shifts his weight in a subtle, repetitive pattern. He does not move his mouth when he speaks.
HAMLET: Hello! I didn't expect to see you here.
ROS stares at him, tongue-tied.
HAMLET: I suppose the Royal Family is upset.
ROS nods.
HAMLET: My mother, the Queen, wishes to see me?
ROS nods again. HAMLET's expression switches to a frown. A potato-shaped object appears in the air between them, rotating slowly.
HAMLET: Would you like to play my ocarina?
→ Yes
No
ROS gulps and opens his mouth.
ROS: My lord, I cannot.
HAMLET: Would you please try? (He crosses his arms and taps his foot.)
ROS: I know no touch of it, my lord.
HAMLET: It's easy! (He waves his hands vaguely.) Put your fingers here and here, then you just put your lips together and blow.
ROS takes the ocarina and does as he's told. After a couple of sour notes, he takes to it immediately and starts playing a short repetitive tune. HAMLET's expression switches to a malicious grin. He turns and jogs away over the edge of the ledge.
ROS stops playing, watching him go.
ROS: My lord, you once did love me.
ROS plays a melancholy little trill. Gravity shifts by a quarter turn, allowing him to walk up the nearest wall, piping thoughtfully.
Elsewhere, GUIL had just gotten both of his boots planted in footholds. When the world tilts, he falls several feet to hit his head on the new floor. The place where he struck shimmers and darkens. Glowing green lettering streams under the dark surface. He stares at it, confused.
HORATIO: (echoing) You think that's air you're breathing now?
A clamor of footsteps seems to rush past in all directions. GUIL looks around but sees no one else.
GUIL: Hello? Rosencrantz? Guildenstern?
OPHELIA: (echoing) Hamlet!
Across the open space, OPHELIA, a teenage girl in blue jeans and a poet shirt, runs up the underside of a stairway, pursuing a baby in striped pajamas. The PLAYER, now literally David Bowie in tight pants, lounges on a nearby ceiling. He makes eye contact with GUIL and smirks.
OPHELIA: There's something I'm forgetting...
PLAYER: (losing his smile) More music! Let's have more music!
ROS, preoccupied by admiring a huge circular archway, hears the echo of 'Music!' and plays a lilting waltz. Gravity smoothly rolls under him, letting him walk all the way around the archway until he is on the former ceiling. He sees a flicker of movement, perhaps the shadow of someone turning a corner, and follows it down the next walkway.
GUIL manages to cling to a ledge when the world spins upside down. He clambers over the edge to the current floor, coming up beside a courtyard entrance covered in red velvet curtains. He peeks past the curtain.
In this courtyard, it is night. An enormous fir tree decked in candles blocks most of the sky. At its foot, two elaborately costumed figures with scimitars dance out a duel. One is a soldier with a nutcracker mask and Hamlet's hat, and the other a giant rat in Claudius' crown.
HAMLET: (echoing, distorted) How now! A rat?
A child in Gertrude's dress peeks out from behind the fir trunk and stares at GUIL. The duelists lower their swords and stop to stare at him too. GUIL stumbles backward and out of their line of sight as quickly as he can.
ROS and GUIL start up a stairway, still chatting. They are unperturbed when the stairway grinds and shifts under them, rotating to connect with a different upper walkway.
ROS: You think her Majesty was in on it?
GUIL: In on what?
ROS: (lowering his voice) The murder, man.
GUIL: Now, nobody said there was no murder.
ROS: No one said it, no. He's the king, no one's gonna say a fucking thing. That doesn't mean there was no fucking murder.
GUIL: I'll grant you that it's convenient, them already being on such good terms. You throw a funeral and a wedding back to back, people are gonna talk. Maybe they were already having carnal relations. But that don't make it murder.
ROS: It don't make it not murder, either. Tell me this, if it's not murder, why's he banishing Hamlet?
GUIL: Oh, I dunno, maybe because Hamlet put on a play flat-out proclaiming he offed his brother with the poison in the conservatory? You don't have to be a murderer to consider that shit offensive.
ROS hears a whistling thump and a crackle of electricity. He follows it. The sound repeats, and he rounds a corner to barely glimpse HORATIO's orange jumpsuit vanishing around the next bend. The hallway has a glowing circle on each wall, man-high, directly across from each other, one orange, the other blue.
Each is actually a window in the wall to another corridor. When ROS stands directly between them, he is looking through the blue portal at a perfect reflection of his own back, followed by an infinitely long, dark hallway of smaller duplicates, ringed in blue and orange fire. He makes a few motions to be sure.
He spins abruptly to check the orange portal, which reflects his back equally well. He tries twisting a few directions, but can't find any angle that will let him see the reflection's face. He reaches a hand out to be sure there is no barrier, then gathers his nerve and jumps through one of the portals.
He lands in, apparently, exactly the same spot. After trying this a couple more times, he stretches out as far as he can to see if he can "catch" the next him, but he's just out of reach. Then he gets distracted posing and checking out his own bottom.
With a fading crackle of electricity and a sound like a coin spinning to the ground, the portal behind him disappears. The one in front of him now shows a different hallway, where GUIL crouches in a stairwell, his arms around his knees. A bleeding body lies crumpled on the stairs above. In the time it takes ROS to hesitate, the second portal disappears and he is alone.
GUIL comes up to a full-length mirror. The architecture in the reflection is wrong: from a side angle, it reflects the Great Hall in Elsinore Palace. MIRROR-ROS and MIRROR-GUIL whisper to each other urgently, their backs to the mirror. Their voices are tinny and distorted.
MIRROR-GUIL: All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it's like being ambushed by a grotesque.
GUIL peers in at them as closely as he can without touching the mirror.
GUIL: There's something they're not telling us.
MIRROR-ROS and MIRROR-GUIL freeze, then slowly turn to look at the mirror. GUIL has already made himself scarce, crouching in a stairwell with his arms around his knees.
On the balustrade of a high balcony, ROS finds a silver top. He spins it once. It whirs in place, perfectly balanced. It shows no signs of slowing. He leans down to put it at eye level, his nose almost touching it, and smiles. It spins on, steady as a rock.
His focus changes. Past the top, across the room, OPHELIA sits on the railing of another balcony, wearing a flimsy black dress, swinging her legs over the long drop. She looks ROS in the eye, kicks off a glass slipper and lets it fall; there is no shattering sound.
OPHELIA: You're waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away.
ROS: Er.
OPHELIA: Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. God be at your table.
ROS backs away, spreading his hands out in a pacifying gesture.
OPHELIA: Now you see me. (She winks at him.)
OPHELIA pushes off the ledge and falls, but slowly, as if through water. ROS looks over the edge, but there's no sign of her. In his haste, he knocks over the top, which ricochets off the ledge and is lost into the room.
GUIL, hunched in the stairwell, hears a whirring buzz. He looks up. OPHELIA hurtles down toward him in a black jumpsuit, her fall slowed by a visible wirework harness strung from a zipline.
OPHELIA: Come on. (She shrugs out of the harness.)
GUIL: Ah.
OPHELIA: What, you thought I was just gathering flowers? My ex-boyfriend is picking off my entire family, there's a pond with my name on it and a noose with yours. I think I've thrown them off the track for now. Let's get your other half and get out of here.
GERTRUDE: (echoing, a long wail) What have you done with his bodyyy?
GUIL looks around for the source and finally notices the crumpled corpse on the stairs. He yelps.
OPHELIA: We can't help him. We've got to move.
She strides down the next walkway. GUIL trails after her, baffled.
OPHELIA: First step is to get you — (She stops dead, staring at something on the floor at her feet.) Don't move.
GUIL looks. It's a full deck of standard playing cards, neatly stacked.
GUIL: What? It's nothing but a pack of cards.
OPHELIA: Shit. Run. Just run!
OPHELIA sprints down the hall. A wind picks up the cards one at the time at first, then in a whole flurry. The cards seek and cling to OPHELIA until she's covered with them, a struggling mass of paper. She collapses to the ground. The cards blow away revealing... nothing. No corpse, no cards, no hint of another person besides GUIL. Silence. He runs like hell.
ROS and GUIL stop in front of a door labeled Do Not Enter.
GUIL: I am having second thoughts about this job.
ROS: We took the money.
GUIL: We could give it back.
ROS: You won't call the boss a murderer, now you don't wanna do the job. What, you reforming or some shit?
GUIL: I am giving it some serious consideration, yeah. We could just walk away. Let the people in one of them other leaks handle this one while we go get a burger or something.
ROS: Go get a burger. Seriously.
GUIL: Or something. Hell, we could do anything we damn well please. We could be heroes.
ROS: Sure. Big damn heroes.
GUIL: I'm serious.
ROS: Tell you what. We send Bizarro Us for burgers, while we stay here, do the job, and get paid as fits a king's remembrance.
GUIL: This is the last one, man. After this, I'm out.
Both straighten their ties.
ROS: It's showtime.
ROS hefts the ocarina in his hand, tosses it a foot in the air and catches it. Again, tosses it... and it hovers in the air, bobbing gently. He watches it in wonder, then reaches to take it. It falls upward with the full force of gravity, shattering on the stairs far above. Perspective does a barrel roll.
ROS goes tumbling through open space, hair floating and limbs scrabbling in slow motion. Time slows almost to a halt, then rushes back to full speed as ROS crashes down on GUIL, who is sprawled in a corner.
ROS: There you are. None too soon.
GUIL: What?
ROS: (a panicked whisper) I had to do your bit. Myself. I had to talk to him by myself.
GUIL: Who?
ROS: Hamlet! (He moves his mouth as if clearing a bad taste.) With your words. I said your words.
GUIL: You should have fetched me. (He tries to get out from under ROS.)
ROS: He was right there. There was nothing for it. Anyway, which of us should I have shouted for?
GUIL: We've just got to keep our grip.
ROS: On what, exactly? We're unstuck, can't you see? Unstuck in... everything! And out of time!
GUIL: Unhinged, possibly. (He's still pinned by ROS.)
CLAUDIUS looms over them, a thin, balding man with a dyspeptic face.
CLAUDIUS: Undirected! Undirected and irresponsible.
He tosses two masks down onto ROS and GUIL, who transform into shaggy-haired 80s teenage boys. ROS makes a half-hearted attempt to extricate himself from GUIL.
CLAUDIUS: I gave you boys one job: Keep Hamlet out of trouble. Instead he's running around with girls, putting on slanderous plays, he won't even speak to his own parents! And what are you two losers doing?
ROS and GUIL duck their heads and mumble something.
CLAUDIUS: (whining) Learning to play the flute. Watching puppet shows. Playing dress up! You don't even know your own names!
ROS and GUIL: Sorry, sir.
CLAUDIUS: Do you know what he needs? What all of you need? Discipline! Hamlet is going to military school, in England, and you are making sure he gets there. Your ship leaves tomorrow. Do I make myself clear?
ROS and GUIL: Yes, sir.
CLAUDIUS glances up, distracted by a glimpse of a very young, very blonde GERTRUDE in short shorts and a halter top.
CLAUDIUS: Good. Good. Now get packing!
CLAUDIUS exits. ROS and GUIL get to their feet.
ROS: Whoa.
GUIL: Heinous.
ROS: Was it just me, or was her royal babeliness significantly more babely than usual?
GUIL: She's his mom, dude.
ROS: I know, but she had most excellent —
GUIL: Dude. England.
ROS sobers and nods. He looks up.
ROS: Hey, if that one Mott the Hoople album cover and that one Blue Oyster Cult album cover had a baby album cover, do you think it would look like this room?
Both blink in realization and pull off the masks. GUIL silently takes both masks and drops them out a nearby window.
GUIL: You were saying. About time.
ROS: Yes, about time.
GUIL: Yes?
ROS: What about it?
GUIL: ... I wonder just how far a train of thought has to be fragmented before it's declared a wreck and melted down for scrap.
ROS: What?
GUIL: (quietly) Say what again. I dare you.
ROS opens his mouth, then closes it, cowed. GUIL realizes he's crossed a line and turns away.
GUIL: For what it's worth, you may be right. (They start up a long stairway with what might be green doors at the other end.)
ROS: (vindicated) About time.
GUIL: Yes.
ROS: Wh— (He catches himself and tries to look as if he is keeping up.) Yes.
GUIL: Assertion: We are out of time.
ROS: Then where are we?
GUIL: When are we, you mean. But we cannot be entirely out of time. If time had stopped dead, we would never know it. No time in which to experience no action. Time must be passing, thus we can only be nearly out of time.
ROS: Keeping a hand in.
GUIL: Traditional wisdom would have it that we are therefore running out of time.
ROS: We're not running, though. More trudging, really.
GUIL: Hypothetically, time keeps running with or without our help.
ROS: So we should run to keep up.
GUIL: (clinging to his line of reasoning) So why has the hammer not yet fallen?
ROS glances up, then exhales in relief that there is no literal hammer. He keeps climbing. They are now about halfway up the stairs. The doors at the top are definitely green.
ROS: You had me worried.
GUIL: I should hope so. There's a feeling in the air. A tang of foreboding, the increasing weight of anticipation. We're so close. And yet... Can't you feel it?
ROS: I feel a bit tired.
GUIL: Yes, that's the weight of it. (To ROS's dismay, he climbs faster.) Something should have happened by now.
ROS: Lots of things have happened.
GUIL: Yes, a thousand and one things, but not the right things! Every time we get close, —
ROS pauses for breath. GUIL bumps into him.
GUIL: — something happens. (He tries another tack.) Imagine a tortoise.
ROS: On its back?
GUIL: Right side up. On a race track. Now when you've let it run halfway, you loose an arrow in the same direction.
ROS: (horrified) Why, what's it done?
GUIL: What?
ROS: The tortoise.
GUIL: The tortoise will not be harmed.
ROS does not look entirely placated, but keeps climbing. They are now about halfway up the stairs.
GUIL: Now by the time the arrow is halfway to the tortoise —
ROS: I've never actually practiced archery. I might hit it by accident.
GUIL: What?
ROS: The tortoise!
GUIL: (slowly) The arrow is metaphorical. It represents time.
ROS: Ah! As the banana represents fruit. (He nods, confident in his understanding.)
GUIL: (ignoring that) We are represented by the tortoise. When the arrow catches us up, events have reached their natural conclusion.
ROS: You said it wouldn't be harmed!
GUIL: Let's try again. Imagine a train.
ROS: If you put that poor tortoise on the train tracks, I'm not speaking to you.
GUIL takes a moment to gather his thoughts. They climb in silence.
GUIL: An overabundance of events suggests, to me, not that time is running out but that time is slowing down. Or to put it another way, that our perception of our movements within it is speeding up. Setting aside the frankly ludicrous case where more time is being added to the system like an extra cup of sugar, which is no way to run a universe.
ROS: It could be stretching out.
GUIL: Like butter scraped over too much bread. It's a working theory. But why? To what purpose?
ROS: Well, we've been here before.
GUIL: And the tale grows in the telling? This seems excessive.
ROS: There's something to be said for the scenic route.
GUIL: If we could choose it, certainly. But we're adrift. You said it yourself. Unstuck.
ROS: I suppose.
GUIL: In the natural order of things, a life could be measured in years, days, hours, minutes, but now? Every heartbeat's become a production number.
ROS: One would almost think you were in a rush to get it over with.
GUIL: We're just prolonging the inevitable!
ROS: (barbed) There's a handy precipice right there, if you're that keen on skipping to the end.
GUIL is shocked out of his rant. He tries to make light.
GUIL: A man set out to measure the coastline of England with a measuring stick a mile long. The locals took one look and said, "Oi, you'll be here all year."
They are about halfway up the stairs now. Realization has begun to dawn. They keep climbing.
ROS: How long was that dumbshow rehearsal supposed to run?
GUIL: Which one?
ROS: The shortest one.
GUIL: Then you mean the longest one.
ROS: With the feather boas. And the tortoise.
GUIL: Eternity in an hour. The Taj Mahal carved on the head of a pin.
ROS: Maybe we're just looking too closely.
GUIL: A man set out to measure the coastline of England with the finest surveying equipment money could buy... And then he ran off with pirates and left his two friends to finish the job. They will be missed.
ROS: Maybe it's a kind of immortality.
GUIL: The last moment of your life stretching out into infinity?
ROS: It worked for Scheherazade.
GUIL: If the choices are death or running an infinite distance by halves, I'll have the chicken.
ROS: Is there a choice?
GUIL: Is there a God?
ROS: Repetition, and it was rhetoric the first time. (His heart isn't in it.)
They stop, still exactly halfway up the stairs.
ROS: They say the devil is in the details.
GUIL: We might have enough spare minutiae to knit a new one at this point.
INT. BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Past the door marked Do Not Enter is a cramped room full of whirring machinery with a small video monitor of the Oz throne room. One wall is a green velvet curtain. POLONIUS, an old, bald man with round glasses and slices of American cheese draped across his head and the shoulders of his suit, is working the controls.
ROS and GUIL walk in and radiate menace. POLONIUS ignores them, twiddling levers and dials, his eyes fixed on the monitor. He presses a button. On the monitor, the arched doors swing open and HAMLET enters.
HAMLET: (muffled through the curtain) Now, mother, what's the matter?
GERTRUDE: (muffled) Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
ROS and GUIL move in to loom more personally, so POLONIUS has to brush against them to move his arms.
POLONIUS: The cheese stands alone. (He dodges them to turn a knob labeled "Ire.")
HAMLET: (muffled) Mother, you have my father much offended!
POLONIUS presses the Innuendo button.
GERTRUDE: (muffled) Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
GUIL leans on the controls, placing his elbow squarely on Innuendo and disturbing a bank of Emotional Intensity sliders.
GUIL: I get the impression we don't have your full attention. I would hate to think we don't have your full attention.
HAMLET: (muffled) Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
GUIL: Hamlet has a trip tomorrow. He's supposed to be packing. Does it look like he's packing for a sea voyage to you?
GERTRUDE: (muffled) My son, you have no idea.
ROS looks at the monitor and shakes his head solemnly. He rests his hip against a switch labeled "Text/Subtext."
HAMLET: (muffled) Queen Gertrude, you're trying to seduce me, aren't you.
POLONIUS: The climax is not the moment of highest intensity, but the point of no return.
ROS and GUIL grab POLONIUS by the arms. He manages to swat "Narrative Imperative Override" before they drag him away from the controls and hold him up against the curtain.
GUIL: It looks like he's playing pattycake with his mother. Now I'm all for having a good relationship with your mother. But if they get too cozy, he might not go on his trip. And if he doesn't go on his trip, our employer is not happy. Right?
ROS: Right.
POLONIUS: Every knot was once straight rope!
HAMLET: (muffled, loudly) How now! A rat? Dead! Dead, for a ducat, dead!
POLONIUS jerks, chokes, twitches. They let him drop. HAMLET's sword is still in him and tears down through the curtain as he falls.
GERTRUDE: (muffled) Oh me, what hast thou done?
HAMLET: (muffled) Nay, I know not. (He throws the curtain open.) Is it the king?
HAMLET shows no surprise at POLONIUS, nor at ROS and GUIL who have nowhere to hide. He looks them both in the eye; they stare back, frozen.
GERTRUDE: O, what a rash and bloody deed is this!
HAMLET goes to the controls, toggles a few switches, types quickly on the attached ancient typewriter, and walks back out to finish his conversation with GERTRUDE. His expression, grim and mournful, never changes.
HAMLET: A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king, and marry with his brother.
A piece of tickertape spits out of the machine. ROS catches it. It reads:
If muscle you will play, I think it fit
You take your turn disposing of the corpse.
These foul-tongued, bloodied faces suit you not.
Halfway up the stairs, the wall beside ROS and GUIL shimmers and fades to darkness. The distortion reveals the FOOL, a mop-haired boy in a yellow tunic, with a blue star on his shirt pocket. He dangles spread-eagled in a web of bright wires. His eyes are unfocused, and his voice is high and tight.
FOOL: Hark me, though my head is spinning
Though you tumble heads o'er heads:
Exit ever births beginning
Phoenix spirals, path retreads
ROS and GUIL give the apparition their full and guarded attention.
Spying from behind the sofa
Through a glass I scried my lord
Sought him out and served him ever
Bittersweet is my reward
Now the spyglass turns upon me
Fortune's fool and playwright's pawn
Bound by script and scourged by critic
On this canvas I am drawn
Nutshell flung from heavy canon
Crack'd from side to side reveals
Ever bigger on the inside
Discs in cogs in drums in wheels
He throws his head back and arches against the wires, which spark at him. A wind rises and buffets him, though it doesn't touch ROS and GUIL.
Lords of fiction, time, and dreaming,
Grant me craft to shape what's told!
Wreak as it was wrought upon me
We grow wise but never old
Yon two fools, I pray you see me
I've the key to break your gaol
Quarry could and might and may be
Warp the record, weave your tale
He sags, and seems to look directly at them. He is trying to deliver something important.
Show, don't tell.
Kill your darlings.
Know your audience.
Omit needless words.
When in doubt, blow something up.
A punishing rain joins the wind and drenches the FOOL. He glances up at it, trying to shake the wet hair from his face.
Though I twist, the plot winds inward
In the past my future's shown
Still, they'll never turn me traitor
You can be me when I'm gone
He half-smiles, then gasps at another shock. Lightning crackles behind him in a tangle of arcs and spirals, a Rorschach test on fire.
Calculations, do not fail me.
Show my visage! Words, take flight!
Hark me, if you can, and heed me.
Now I'll never know if I was —
The wires crackle in a blinding, deafening flash. ROS and GUIL shy away, shielding their eyes. In the after-echo, something small and metal clatters against stone. When they look again, the wall is solid.
They look at each other, troubled. ROS looks away first, casting around to find the FOOL's star badge at their feet. This does not break the uneasy silence. ROS gestures up the stairs: Should they keep going?
GUIL: Right. I think it's clear we've gotten about as far as we're reasonably going to get that way.
GUIL turns and stumbles. The stairs down now stretch so far he cannot see the bottom. He almost falls, but ROS grabs him by the coat. They cling to each other, staring down into the abyss.
ROS: He did tell us, earlier.
GUIL: Yes.
ROS: He warned us about the stairs.
GUIL: Yes, thank you.
ROS: Look at them, they just keep happening.
GUIL: (rattled, shouting) Yes, thank you!
INT. RELATIVITY
ROS and GUIL drag the corpse away through the Do Not Enter door. They take it to the edge of the next convenient ledge, leaving a long smear of blood. GUIL moves to take off his mask; ROS holds a hand up.
ROS: You sure you don't want to wait on that? At least until we've finished with this. (He gestures at the body.)
GUIL: You read the man. This ain't right. This ain't us.
ROS: We do not answer to Hamlet.
GUIL: Can you seriously keep looking Mirror You in the face on Claudius's payroll?
GUIL takes off his mask. ROS reluctantly follows suit. They both shudder, staring at the body. GUIL gets up the nerve to tuck the masks into the corpse's jacket, and together they nudge it off the ledge with their boots. It lands on the stairs below with an unnecessarily visceral sound effect.
ROS and GUIL abscond down an unbloodied walkway at something close to a run.
GUIL carefully turns away from the abyss and looks over the railing, surveying their other options. The room continues to be vast, contradictory, and full of multi-story drops.
ROS looks over the railing and finds that the outside of it is carved with decorative writing, a long stream of jumbled Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Cherokee, Hanzi, Hangul, Ge'ez, and Braille. Hanging his head over the railing and trailing his fingers along the writing, he starts following it up the stairs. In a dozen steps, he's reached the top. GUIL stares at him.
ROS: Well? Come on.
GUIL follows, also successfully reaching the broad stairwell at the top. The arched green doors with ornate gold handles loom over them. They do not touch the doors.
GUIL: That's not the way out.
ROS: No.
GUIL: We've come too far. There must be a way.
ROS: Must there?
GUIL: That messenger thought so.
ROS: The one who called our names?
GUIL: The one with the key to break our gaol. We just saw him. You were there.
ROS: Oh, him! I always gloss over poetry.
GUIL: You —
ROS: Especially Elvish ballads. Has anyone ever actually paid attention through an entire Elvish ballad? I know I haven't.
GUIL: A visitation. A portent wreathed in literal Sturm und Drang, delivered at what cost we know not. A bolt of lightning, a martyr crying out from the cross, 'I have your salvation!', a glint of gold found at a crossroads. And you can't be bothered to work through a bit of meter.
ROS: I say, if you've got something to say, say it. If it's important, don't go burying it in poetry.
GUIL: This is why we can't have nice things.
GUIL leans against the wall beside the door, exhausted. From this angle, he can see two masks hanging on the wall behind ROS. He fetches them down. The masks are of a white man with a gold earring and a black man with a mustache, both with flat, hostile expressions.
GUIL: I'd feel better if these had any kind of pedigree. References of good character.
ROS: To be fair, we don't have those either.
GUIL: If we're running around putting on strange faces, we might as well start drinking out of any bottle that says, "Drink me."
ROS: Well, I'd rather have a bottle in front of me... (He takes the white mask.)
GUIL: (resigned) Bottoms up, then.
They put on the masks and settle into cheap black suits. ROS adjusts a heavy gun holster and nods appreciatively. By silent agreement, they turn left to a new side corridor, matching strides in an easy walking pace.
ROS: You ever read any Vonnegut?
GUIL: I haven't. He any good?
ROS: Yeah. Weird, though. He had this thing about mirrors. Any mirrors, even little ones, like cop shades, they freaked him out. You know what he called them?
GUIL: He didn't just call them mirrors?
[End of Act II]