This time he manages to approach close enough to pick out individual trees in the smoky purple haze. Their leaves are thin, ragged, and black, and release wisps of purple-grey mist at unpredictable intervals. Their bark is thick, gnarled, and ranges in colour from charcoal grey to a dusty lilac.

...except for the one tree that's different from all the rest. Its bark is smooth, its leaves are neat and glossy, and its branches hang heavy with clusters of large, slightly iridescent, pitch-black cherries. That faint iridescence is the only hint of colour on the whole tree: the rest of it is all shades of grey, paler on the leaves and darker on the bark.

There are no pools of ink visible from outside the forest; he'll have to go deeper in if he wants to find one.

He's been informed that the black cherries are edible, but that only gets him as far as picking some for later. He keeps moving, trying to go quickly and with a minimum of sound, ready to turn around and book it if he sees another nightmare.

The grass underfoot is greyish purple and gives off more wisps of mist when stepped on. The mist is neither damp like fog nor chokingly dry like dust; it smells faintly sweet, with an aftertaste like stale air freshener.

When he's deep enough into the forest that the desert is getting hazy behind him, but not yet deep enough that it's disappeared entirely, he glimpses a second black cherry tree up ahead, presiding over a small pool of black liquid exactly the same colour as the cherries.

Oh, thank goodness. The gridded arrangement of the trees makes it pretty easy to be sure he's not going in circles, but not being able to see the edge the next time he looked over his shoulder would still have been worrying. He pulls out a bucket and heads for the ink pool, ready to scoop some up and head out.

Scoop! He now has a bucket of ink!

—and there's a rustling in the trees off to the side and he should perhaps be going now.

The fastest Bruce has ever gone in his life before this was the time in high school when the gym teacher said anyone who got a personal best on the mile run would be allowed to skip the mile run the following week. Bruce is now going significantly faster than that. 

He makes it to the desert before the nightmare catches up.

Well the nightmare came out into the desert after him last time didn't it so how about he just keeps fucking running.

The sound of pursuit fades into the distance behind him.

Then Bruce can slow down enough to look over his shoulder, and then eventually slow down more to catch his breath. Gradually his fear turns into exhilaration. He's alive, he didn't get in a fight, and he has his ink! Time to grin the entire rest of the way back to camp.

Camp contains a forest spirit who waves at him as he approaches!

{all okay? not eaten by nightmare?}

"Not eaten by nightmare! And I got ink, so now I can make that writing desk!" Go go gadget writing desk?

Go go gadget writing desk! It's got legs! It's got surfaces! It's got numerous drawers!

There's a cute little lamp affixed to one corner on a swivelable arm, so he can adjust the lighting situation to his liking, and the drawers prove to contain lots and lots of neatly stacked paper and fountain pens and bottles of ink. The desk has a little circle, in the corner across the top edge from the lamp, into which such a bottle could nestle.

The pens being fountain pens makes sense, under the insane moon logic of this place, given that the recipe called for reeds and ink. That doesn't mean he knows how to use a fountain pen at all, so his next activity is going to be learning that, and then taking notes on all the stuff he's observed. While conserving ink despite the apparent abundance, because he doesn't want to have to go get more any time soon.

If he tracks his supplies, he might notice that the drawers are self-replenishing: there are six pens in the drawer when he opens it to take one out, and six pens in the drawer when he opens it again to put it back. The same for paper and ink bottles.

Well that's just amazing and cool. Friendship ended with Conservation of Mass, now Writing Desk is his new best friend. He writes down every phenomenon he's noticed that's different from what he'd expect on Earth and a bunch of speculation about possible underlying physics and a half-notes half-rant paragraph about how, if he can eat the food here and have it keep him alive, then either he and the food are made of the same kind of substances or the food is changing what it's made of when he eats it. So either food here (he should ask the spirits if they've named this place; if not he's naming it Gridland) is made of proteins and carbohydrates and whatnot or it's turning into that stuff inside him or he is entirely or partially made of alien matter now. His biology seems to be working normally except he can apparently live on apples without feeling like crap or constantly craving tofu.

Writing Desk is a very good friend! He might need to do something eventually about all this paper his new friend is generating, but for now, he has infinite stationery and can write all the ranty paragraphs his heart desires.

When he's done writing he goes to find the forest spirit again. "Hi! How've you been?"

{good! how friend? is ink good?}

"I'm doing well and the ink is great! Want to do some more science, now that I can take notes?"

Bounce bounce. {yes!!}

"Great! Is there anything you're especially curious about?"

Thinking, thinking...

{am curious about sky,} the spirit finally decides. {cloud spirit knows things about sky but cloud spirit is in sky so hard to find and ask.}

"The sky is cool! Are there are specific questions you want to answer, or shall we just gather data and see what we find out?" For his part he wants to know if the acceleration due to gravity is the same and whether air resistance works the same and whether the ideal gas law still basically holds and whether air pressure drops the higher you go and what the composition of the atmosphere is, though his ability to breathe it means it's at least pretty similar to Earth's unless it's the same weird deal as with the food.

Tiny pointy shrug. Tiny happy bounce. {science!}