By Paul Preston
FRIDAY- Local shepherd boy Abdul Balhafid, while tending to his flock on the steppes of the lower quad, came across a bloodstained leather-bound book. The illiterate boy quickly turned the book in to BoUNCe magazine to have it read to him and to collect the ten-cupcake reward. The book turned out to be the log of Captain James Hemlock, missing since March. Excerpts from the journal describe his final voyage.
3/22: Spirits are high! Every man in my service is excited to be the first crew to completely map the bowels of Venable! It shan’t be easy, but we have begun, and our names shall go down in history for it!
3/23: This place sickens me; a dim catacomb, joyless and cold, seeming unfit for any form of life.
3/24: I have, for the best I could make of it, moved the full length of Venable! This was accomplished once before by Captain Henry Quaid, but I shall go one further and map every corridor!
3/29: This place vexes me; after the time spent here so far, the reality of this place is seeming to ripple. We anchored a tracer line and left two men to make sure it was secured before moving down a long, straight corridor, but when we got to the end, we were back at the root of the line! Both men were gone, though, save for some spatters of blood and hoof tracks. God save them.
4/2: I am in the basement of every madman’s nightmare. I have used caliper, compass and plumbob to the extent of human precision, and I can only confirm it; the halls of this place overlap mathematically without doing so spatially! I have already lost three men, sending them on a simple mission to walk around a block of rooms only to have them vanish. Two were foolish enough to drink from the fountains - - a quick death was the most we could do for them.
4/5: The tangles of this maze have beaten us. The spatial twistings of this huge möbius strip have confounded all my navigational knowledge, and we are helplessly lost. Worse still, we are preyed upon. These godless halls are home to a sub-species of Asian-American grad student, half-man and half-bull which has already claimed two of my finest men. Nothing scares him off but fire and fine arts electives, and we are running thin on both.
4/20: I am near the end. My men are, lost, eaten, crushed, or simply spirited into the walls of this linoleum hell. Food ran out days ago. Living on gum under desks. I thought I was saved when I came across a vending machine, but apparently the blasted things don't take ONE cards. May God ... forgive me ... for...what I ha...