(Painting by OktoberBeef, https://www.furaffinity.net/user/oktoberbeef )

From the Scrolls of Dee, found in her personal library under the Tower of the Sphinx. An extract from a letter to another student at the Tower, dated to Dee's first year of study there:

You would think that waking up floating, nude, inside a large glass cylinder full of goo, with an entirely unfamiliar set of anatomy and tubes stuck in all sorts of uncomfortable places would be the worst part of anyone's year, let alone their day.

That day, it just barely squeaked into my top five.

To start with, the goo was draining away, and as it cleared my ears, I could finally make out that the loudest noise was a voice repeatedly annoucing, "Seismic event detected. Structural integrity compromised. Please evacuate immediately."

Once I finished unplugging myself and figured out how to stand on my own two hooves (even if I was still rather wobbly, and everything was weirdly unbalanced), and then how to open the cylinder's door, my next unpleasant discovery was a dead woman; she was as nude as I was, but unlike me, she looked like a member of my original species, a mostly-furless ape called a 'human'. Before I finished making it out of the tunnels, I found four corpses in total, of varying levels of human-ness - all women, all nude, none providing any particular clues other than their existence.

Getting out of wherever I was while the getting was good seemed a good Plan A, but just in case I could never make it back, I took a very quick look around, to try to set the place in my memory. Doing so, I found one object which caught my attention; a small blue box with a gear-shaped add-on on one side; it was shaped just like an object from a certain set of stories. I'd always wanted a copy of it for myself, but could never afford to get one made. Like in the stories, when I put it on my forearm, it stuck there all on its own; and yes, it's the one I'm still wearing now. It was with a pile of other small things I couldn't immediately identify, so I grabbed a towel from by a sink and swept them all into it, turning the cloth into a makeshift bag; and I grabbed a metal stick on my way out the door, because sticks can be handy, too.

I don't want to share too much about everything else I saw in that place, in case some of the people who don't like me learn of what I'm sharing with you now and try to sneak in. I don't know if I'll ever make it back there, but if I do, I don't want to find the place looted clean. I will say that just on the path between where I started and where I exited, there were a couple of dozen deadly man-traps. The least of which was a bucket propped over an ajar door, only instead of being filled with water or paint, it was full of rocks quite capable of causing a concussion. I think even Grimtooth, the mythical ultimate trapster, would give the place a thumbs-up. Only two of the bodies I found were where they might have died from the traps; and given their lack of wounds, they still might have perished from whatever felled the other two.

Finally making it through the last door and out the entrance, I had my biggest surprise of all of that day. Or, now that I think of it, of any day since. I'm not sure how I can explain it to anyone now alive, but before that day, I was from a place where the day was lit by a small disc that moved across the sky, then went below the horizon and, unseen, went back to where it started, instead of being a solid, eternally-lit bar. ... And I have yet to come up with a satisfactory way to explain what a 'horizon' is to people who can see the whole world curving up and overhead.

After spending some time just trying to process the basics of what I was seeing, eventually I looked at my tail, my tail looked back at me, and I said to myself, "Well, let's go see if we can find somebody to talk to."