Your first mister was your first monster.

He was the walking result of an experiment with an ordinary misean and something else which you must have found at bedrock, judging by the early conversion of your lowest mining operation to something between a laboratory and a studio, and the sudden evacuation of the entire crew back to the upper levels.

Whatever you found down there is, I suppose, the mystery now; yours, in any case.

Things started out well enough. The mister seemed to intuit your commands, sometimes your whims, and eventually began performing tasks which you hadn’t yet noticed needed doing. It could instruct the miseans on your behalf more easily and efficiently than you could directly.

You outlined instructions, protocols, contingencies, and he implemented them throughout the various segments of your emerging workforce. This freed you, and your mister, to resume excavating the bottom of the world and studying what you found. The mister had free roam of the mines, but the lab was yours alone.

This went on without any apparent hitch, and for some time. But in retrospect I can see the initial chip which became the inaugural crack in what would soon shatter beyond repair.

So to speak.

If I know you at all, you’ve never willingly revisited any of what transpired in hell before you went dark, so this may be breaking news:

One morning while you were constructing cells, or closets, on the bottom level, the mister stepped into a bucket by accident, but paid little attention to it until he tried to walk and promptly fell flat on the floor. The commotion caught your attention and you watched as he rolled onto his back, sat up, and stared at the bucket stuck on his foot for a long moment, then rolled back over and began to crawl on his hands and knees. As you looked on in confusion, he slowly navigated around tools and tables until arriving at another bucket, which he took in one hand and dragged along toward a bench. Very carefully, he climbed from his knees onto the bench, placed the bucket in position, and placed his other foot in the bucket.

You laughed.

He hadn’t noticed you watching, and the sound seemed to startle him; he’d never heard that before.

When he looked up, with no real conception of what you were doing, he could have thought you were convulsing, or crying, except he had no concepts for those, either.

“Sorry,” you said, once you’d brought it down to stifled giggling, at which he rose from the bench and made a second attempt; the right bucket landed cleanly, the left did not.

His chin did. The second fall knocked him out, and buckled your knees.

He didn’t stir again until after you’d gotten up, gotten ahold of yourself, pulled the buckets off his feet, got ahold of yourself again, collected two other nearby buckets and stacked them all safely off the floor, then drifted off to another task in another room. When he did finally rise, he went directly back to work, unfazed, or oblivious to the entire episode.

Maybe you caught a hint of something odd, even that morning, and it was simply lost in the noise of clattering buckets and crashing bodies. Maybe I’m wrong, and you’ve thought this all over in your ‘solitude’; at the time, like him, you seemed to brush it off and move on.

Eventually, you completed the structure of whatever you were building at rock bottom. You sent the mister on a rare trek back to the upper levels to inspect the progress in person, while you returned to the lab and began producing paint, or something like it. When he returned, he apprised you of whatever was happening upstairs, before setting about various chores and tasks around the building and the mine until you’d perfected your formula, or found the perfect shade.

You painted the first room alone, while the mister watched and learned. For the second room, you gave him a brush; he began quite slow and hesitant, but ultimately finished his two walls nearly as quickly as you finished yours. In the third room, you were nearly done with your first wall when he was painting the corner it shared with his third.

You were standing on the second step of a small ladder, sliding your brush from left to right along the top of the wall, careful to avoid the ceiling. He was beside you, on your right, brushing to his left, somewhat more quickly, when his elbow poked you three times in the ribs.

Caught off guard, you flinched, laughing, and quickly, clumsily stepped down from the ladder to catch your balance.

“That-“

crash.

With a jump, you turned to see the door on the far side of the room, now closed and barred behind the mister, who was moving toward you in long strides; growing strides. In a blink, he was two steps away with both hands reaching toward you, when you realized that you had dropped your pen.

Too late.

Two days and a night later, the door opened again. The mister emerged immediately, leaving the structure and disappearing into the mines.

He never closed the door, and you never left the floor.

Even still, there you are. Sealed in.

How the hell did that happen?

I don’t know what you remember, or if you can.

I can’t see inside, but I’ve seen what you chased down into the well; so I can imagine what you’re up against.

I would have come for you myself and, could I get through, maybe you would be answering those strange calls, which I happen to know you can hear ringing through those paper walls.

This screening of yours forced my hand — to math, for fuck’s sake, and some very short division, indeed.

The quotients are going to retake what slipped from your hand to the floor of your new address on the longest evening you’ll ever know — if you’re willing to follow the lead of a terribly shy shadow whose grip on reality will be several floors above you both.

You let a stranger into our home.

Our home.

But this last missive comes with the good news enclosed: repentence and forgiveness are less than obsolete in your neck of these woods, and the glass won’t hold with a grudge, regardless.

Still, if you won’t go with, then you’re not coming, and I happen to know that, too.

The ball, or your court. Your call, sweetart.