It does not! This is a new place! The place has a sunset with lots of pink clouds and distant mountains! It also has some big stones right nearby. A little further away is a really big cave mouth in a cliff face, with vines and darkness. In the other direction there is an absolutely enormous brown thing.

Some shapes in the stones glow burning red, then fade away. A distant bang sounds from the cave. A gentle breeze wafts by.

Woah!!  This is not only a new place, but an entirely new kind of place.  It bears looking at for a long time.  Basically none of the things here are like any other things it's used to.

- A bang is at least a little like some things it's used to!!  It'll go see if it can find out what's up with that.

The cave is dark and has hanging green things. Deeper in, the cave has:

• more hanging green things
• pointy ceiling parts
• glowing things hanging from the pointy ceiling parts
• a shiny, flat floor
• more rocks that have parts that glow and then stop glowing
• a squarish gray thing sitting in the middle of the shiny
• a passage that slopes down deeper

More distant bangs come from the dark ahead.

This place is so interesting!  It's kind of like the sea, in that there is more Down available than usual, but is otherwise unlike the sea in most ways.  The glowy bits are pretty nice but would be better if they produced goodsounds.  Do they seem inclined to?  Are the distant bangs goodsoundy at all?

The distant bangs are very bangy, but there are sometimes quieter whooshes or rumbles, and some of them are almost goodsoundy. The formerly glowing stones make stone sounds when tapped.

The hanging glowing things are a little bit warm; they clank and clink when tapped, and the glowing in them flickers! If they're tapped juuuust right they sound kind of good, and — whoops this one is falling down. It crashes into the floor, not a goodsound at all, and now part of the floor is glowing and warm!

- Oh!!  It will try and tap the other hanging glowing things more carefully, but still aiming to reproduce goodsoundness.  If more of them crash at least the floor will probably become more interesting.

They can only be convinced to produce a couple of sounds, with lots of clinking along with the faint ringing, but they don't fall down if not set swinging hard. The glowing floor gets dimmer.

Does the dimming of the floor coincide with it getting less toasty, or is it still the same?

The glowing on the floor is warm, and the warmth on the floor maybe lingers more but it is definitely fading. The hanging things are also warm, but faintly. The glowing stones didn't seem warm at all.

Do the hanging things do the thing other lights do where they get hotter when a hand is pressed against them than when they are merely tapped?

They do! Very!

Oh!!  In that case they will only be tapped from this point on.  (Tap tap taptap tap taptaptap tap   tap.)  Are they getting more goodsoundy over time, given that it's trying very hard to make them so?  - Oops, that was a pretty hard tap.

They can get less of the not-goodsounds but not really more of the goodsounds.

The cleartap cylinder part of the hanging thing cracks! Warm bright stuff trickles out and onto another part of the floor!

Hmmmmmmm, touching the glowing hanging things for a while caused them to be Hot, which wasn't very fun.  But can it, if it's very careful and doesn't touch them for too long, remove a glowing-hangingness from its hanging, and instead hold it?

The one remaining undropped uncracked glowing-hangingness has a loop on the top, and the pointy ceiling part has a thing which is only part of a loop that goes through the other loop.

Okay!  If it only touches the loop, how hot is that part?  (And even if it leaves its hand there for a while, what about that.)

It is very warm, but not very warm.

Perfect.  Its plan is to:

• GRAB the full loop (with its entire hand)
• LIFT the glowing-hangingness (by the loop)
• EXTRACT the full loop from the not-full loop (by lining up the full loop with the unloop part and pulling the loop out)

There are, it turns out, no unforeseen obstacles to this plan.

The glowing-hangingness sloshes when it is moved. The glowing part wiggles a little, but it stays lit, and does not spill onto the floor, or crack, or make ungoodsounds.

Success!

. . . woah.  The sloshing is really good, especially the part where the way it sloshes changes depending on how the glowing-no-longer-hangingness is moved.

Shake-a shake-a?

Sloshy sloshy! The glowing part in the middle wiggles a lot and gets really bright sometimes and really dark sometimes.

SHAKE-A SHAKE-A SHAKE-A SHAKE-A SHAKE

Oops, now there is glowyVERYHOT spilling out all over!

OW OW OUCH :(  More shaking, but in a way where the no-longer-glowing(-as-much)-no-longer-hangingness gets flung far away and hopefully the VERYHOT is also flung off its hand.  Ouch ouch :'(

Crash! Splatter! The glowing stuff stops glowingHOT pretty quickly once it is not in one place in quantity. Some sticks around, warm and slippery-feeling.

Oh . . . well that's kind of nice of the glowy, even though it was just being so ouchful a second ago.  It runs its fingers slippily over the remaining splatter.

It continues being slippery but also becomes less so with more rubbing.

All the glowing on the floor is dark again. The cave has no more glowing-hangingness left.

Hmmmmm.  This requires some pondering.  It reaches into its sleeve and extracts - ITS SPONGE has a HOLE in it.  And part of it is BLACK and LESS SQUISHY.  That's so mysterious and also terrible, although there's still a fair area of squishibility.  Maybe something is eating the sponge.  Squish squoosh.

It (CAREFULLY) deposits the sponge back in its sleeve and decides to float further into the cave.

The straight, stone-lined passage slopes down diagonally a distance about as long as the cave so far, then opens out into another sort of cave with many branching passages with walls of several different colors and all lumpy, except for some flat brown bits. At the bottom of the cave the floor has a circular pit with red stuff in the bottom, and there is a glob of something-or-other on one part of the part of the floor that is lumpy instead of circular.

Distant squishings and skitterings are audible.

Ooh, so many choices!  Pit or skitterings, pit or glob or skitterings . . .

Skitterings!

Is THAT a skitterings?  It kind of looks like one, maybe.  It isn't a food but sometimes things that aren't foods still move around, that's normal.

It's — not a skitterings! Its preferred method of locomotion is crawling and long leaps, making thumping noises, not skittering ones. The skittering must be elsewhere in the caves.

It doesn't seem to notice the visitor. Instead, it leaps all the way to the lumpy bits on the not-circular floor and starts shoving its face into them. The vicinity is splattered with red stuff.

Is there anything interesting about the lumpy bits, that would be enticing the leapthumper to enshoven its face so??

They are squishy and wet and red?

Hmmmmmm what if it tries to touch them?  With its hand, not its face.

Not-red squishy stuff is squishy like the surface of food. Red stuff is gooey and sticky.

Interesting!  It wipes its gooey-sticky hand off on its robe.  Is it clear what direction the skitterings are coming from, and can it go in such a direction if one exists?

It's not very clear or straight but there is definitely a direction. While heading that way it finds some wall that is on fire.

WOAHHHHHH.  Glowy!!  It's definitely going to go check that out.

It's glowing and warm like the clinking things in the earlier cave but it doesn't look or sound any clinking and it is glowing for a lot longer, and there seems to be glowing stuff that is disappearing but also with little bits falling off to the ground below.

Oh!  That's an eating thing, then!!  It's so smart.

Hmmmmm.  It cannot be eaten, but touching the other glowy was still unpleasant at first.  And the sponge . . . .

It puts its RIGHT hand nearer to (but not touching) the newglowy while keeping its sponge in its LEFT sleeve and far away.

Very warm! No other effects.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

poke (so fast, so quick, very dexterity, totally going to tap the glowy even though the glowy is all wiggly)

The actual glowing part is VERY warm and insubstantial and wiggly. It is attached to black dry crunchy stuff. Crunch.

That isn't what it had expected!!  Poke poke??  Yeah, it definitely can't touch this glowy, which is super weird.  (Also it gets very hot very fast but as long as its poking is even faster then that's all good.)

It floats down to inspect the little falling bits.

They are more of the black crunchy stuff which falls off. Some of the bigger bits are less black and more brown, and some of them are glowy. Sometimes the glowy parts go dark before the bits fall on the ground, but sometimes they don't, and there's a heap of not-darkened-glowy-brown-bits on the ground below.

The skittering noises are in this direction too!

Hopefully the skitterings will still be there when it's done investigating.  How hot are the not-darkened bits, if it pokes them?

They are less hot than some of the parts that have not fallen down but are still much hotter than any not-glowing thing.

Poke poke poke poke.  Poke the black stuff and poke the brown stuff.

Hmmm.  Hmmmmmmmmm.

Poke the fallen-wall black stuff, extract sponge and poke the sponge black stuff?

The sponge black is maybe more-crunchy too, and the way in which it is black and less-black is similar, but it doesn't make lots of crunchy noises like the fallen stuff.