The World Next Door episode one

    in the world next door there was a shimmering pond on the side of a great mountain.  the pool shimmered in the pure sun light, yet to be tainted by so much atmosphere and physics.  it shimmered because, obviously, it was a shimmering pool and shimmering was it's deal.  just below the shimmering surface fractal shrimp swam in hypnotic patterns, led by unknown forces of nature to dance in patterns of geometric intricacy that only happen when chaos gets things exactly right. on the far edge of the pool stood a single pine, it's branches swirling like a dali watch stirred with the spoon of imagination.  roots spread along the mountain rock in every direction, cascading down the mountain, circling the pond, a few brave ones even venturing into the pool itself, anchoring the pine to the mountain, digging into every available fissure of the mountain, becoming the same as the mountain.  and so the three, mountain, pool and tree, went about their existence, relying on each other.  the tree and the pool required the mountain to hold them.  the tree needed the pool for water.  the pool needed the tree's roots to keep the ledge from eroding away.  the mountain needed both of them because it was the mountain with the shimmering pool and dali pine and that was its deal.
    the most recent addition to the scene is a tall young man, although at present he would be better described as long, since he was laying out full length on a patch of moss at the edge of the shimmering pool.  a pinky finger just barely breached the surface of the shimmering pond.  a school of fractal shrimp danced around his finger like the tendrils of a plasma lamp.  a cool breeze ruffled the wrinkles of a tye-dyed tee that had seen brighter days.  If you would have questioned the shirt, it would have said that it was happy to just have color.  Recent events had the shirt trying to cope with existence as a drab gray mess, not even a dignified, deep gray, but a messy, unnatural gray (see "color of life").  the breeze continued over the shimmering pool, causing the pool's halo to ripple slightly.  at the foot of the tree two squirrels enjoyed the breeze, reclined in their lawn chairs, sharing a pine cone.  the taller squirrel was just about to mention a mathematical correlation he'd noticed between two schools of fractal shrimp when our sleeping youth came to.  The squirrel got no farther than the equal yet opposite rotation of the edge patterns when he was forced into banal thought processes by the approach of a foreign intellect.  The other squirrel had anticipated the awakening and was hurrying to hide the lawn chairs.  the youth sat up and stretched his arms out to meet his toes.  then he stood up and took a deep breath.  neurons slowly began to fire.  if you were of the vaguely omnipotent mind you would have realized a mathematical correlation between the pattern of his neural activity and the fractal shrimp collective, too bad you're not a squirrel.  there was a girl, he remembered that much.  vague images of a green grassy field and the ascent up the mountain were evaporating as he tried to recall them, barely discernible in the far past were gray shadows, tall stones that stabbed at a gray sky.  The girl he still remembered, though.  she had come with him from the gray place, she had been with him in the field, had helped him climb the mountain, and she had lain down with him.  He peered over the edge only to see a vast vertical plain of rock that disappeared into the cloud layer.  there didn't appear to be any way off the ledge.  where the ledge met the mountain there was only more of the vertical plain.  it was almost as if the roots of the pine held the ledge onto the mountain.  Our protagonist did what he usually did in such situations, he sat down.  he watched the squirrels for a little bit as they busied themselves about squirrel things, or at least what the squirrels thought he thought squirrel things were.  they were, after all, only vaguely omniscient and had some moral issues about playing up to stereotypes.  they didn't have to play squirrel for very long, though, because the fractal shrimp soon caught his attention and he wouldn't get it back for another few hours.
    "cocktail?"
    "yes, thank you"
    "you're ever so welcome"
    "so, as i was about to say, before we were so rudely interrupted, is that the alpha cluster and the gamma cluster share certain geometrical similarities such as..."