If you were offered the chance to disappear from your current life to learn the mysteries of the universe, would you leave?
Reality tears open, and four strangers are ripped from their ordinary lives, waking aboard a stalled, star-born train. To return to their homes and loved ones, they must traverse nine platforms, mend what’s broken, and confront a space that offers them what they’ve secretly always wanted.
Theme 🔗
Authentic Living vs. Expected Duty
Sub-themes: Desire, Determinism
Core Concepts 🔗
- The Line — A cosmic train carries sleeping passengers forward on a seemingly endless track. The sleeping passengers’ consciousness experiences regular life on Earth.
- Snap‑Out / Snap‑In — If the train stops, people are pulled from their lives to the station. When it moves again, they snap back into the exact instant they left; no time passes.
- The Station — Nine platforms are suspended in space, laid out in a grid next to the train line. Each platform is rich with life, warmth, and community. Locals live here.
- Inhabitants & Tongue — Locals follow daily rituals; their language is unintelligible to the four strangers.
- The Inner Layers — Each platform has a stack of virtual layers under them, puzzles are solved here in order to carry out repairs and navigate the spaces.
Act 1 - Leaving the Dollhouse 🔗
The story opens with a brief snapshot of domestic life for Ash (32), who has recently moved to a new town with her husband, Andrew (45).
She builds doll houses from her home office. They are intricate and artisanal but ultimately consumer products just like many others. She sends off packages one after another as Andrew puts food in front of her. He talks away happily and she appreciates his joy and company. Something in her demeanor, a strained tic, suggests a quiet absence, a sense that something essential is missing.
Without warning, reality collapses. Ash finds herself sitting on a stationary train adrift in a living star field.
Mood Concept, the stationary train, credit @ventiquePx
A layout and early concept of the 9 platforms
She steps out ono a platform. The train’s track stretches in a straight line into the starry void in both directions. More upsetting is that her body looks like a mannequin, and her face is plain and hard, like an expressionless mask.
A figure in a frog mask appears. They call themselves “Guide”, they’re odd, a bit suspicious, but also very gentle and caring. They help Ash shape her body to its familiar form and features before disappearing.
Ash meets the other three passengers (Matt, Mosse, Gabrielle) playing catch-up as the last of the 4 to wake up on the train.
Rules emerge in fragments over several encounters with the cast and Guide: the track is a single line; the train stops when the station determines the passengers ‘a risk’, It can only be started again through repairs, allowing the group to return home, and those repairs must be carried out by the passengers themselves.
Matt, 42, having the clearest and most immediate stake to return quickly, his two-year-old, starts to very diplomatically rally the group to find a path home.
Gabriel, 55, starts a very scientific investigation into space and what it is, feeling initially both excited and confident. But soon she begins to feel bothered by the implications of her findings.
Moose, 27, also felt very urgent to get home to his dog ‘Luffsa’. Feeling stressed about missing her feeding time. At the same time, he’s fascinated by the ability to shape his body and quickly starts to “improve” his appearance.
By the end of this ACT 1, the four passengers resolve to repair what’s gone wrong. If they can fix it, the train will move, and they can return home to their loved ones.
Act 2 - Learning The Language 🔗
Besides Guide, local occupants live on these platforms. Ash and the other passengers struggle to engage with them directly; it’s like they’re ghosts in this world. There is evidence of care and community, tended gardens, shared rituals, acts of intimacy.
Guide teaches the group how to connect with the inner layers of the platforms. Each platform sits on top of a stack of virtual layers. Anyone can enter the virtual layers below by leaving their body behind and taking on an avatar.
As Ash descends the inner layers of the platforms, and learns the rules of how to navigate it, it lets her open bridges between the platforms. It also allows her to connect more with the local population. It’s like she’s learning their language.
The group makes progress, crossing the platforms, learning more about the rules needed to solve its puzzle from Guide as well as starting to see more details in the spaces. But tension and conflict is rising.
Mosse is compelled by this world and its possibilities, he feels seen, he experiments with his shape, trying both masculine and feminine bodies, eventually settling into one that captures his desires from both.
Matt is unable to traverse the platform layers himself; fear won’t let him. Leaving his body causes too much stress, and he’s even more distressed that he’s unable to push past his fear. What does it say about him as a father?
Gabrielle’s investigation increasingly suggests that the world they left may be a form of simulation. But she’s not getting a straight answer from Guide: “I wouldn’t call it fake.” It’s hard to tell if Guide is just avoiding diminishing their world out of kindness or if they are withholding information. Gabrielle, a proud truth seeker, questions what leaving this “higher plane” means for everything she believes in.
Ash herself is drawn to the care and consideration given to the environment. Intricate attention is going to small things, not just making it but maintaining and nurturing.
She may also start to feel a bit spellbound by Guides gentle attention and touch which is both careful and attentive, yet comically clumsy.
Guide is picking up on Ash’s curiosity and fascination for the platforms, it’s different from Gab’s objective analysis, Mosse’s tendency to see the space as a mirror for his own desires, or Matt’s respectful but firm sense of what ‘home’ and ‘away’ mean.
Guide shows and teaches Ash how things are cared for on the platforms. This also lets Ash travel much deeper down the layers than the other passengers. Ash feels like she’s flying.
But in order to complete the repairs needed to restart the train the group needs to descend deeper into the older, more intimidating layers of each platform. Guide is unable or unwilling to follow at this depth and here exists a threat that corrupts and seems to grow upwards the layers. For the moment, completing the required puzzles appears impossible.
Ash finds a pathway to the central platform, a place of care for things that have passed. This is where Guide reveals the cost of solving puzzles at the deepest layers; one has to provide an offering in the form of language. Slowly, the visitors’ mother tongue will be taken.
Guide takes their mask off, and offers to kiss Ash. The proposal is shocking. But instead of backing away, Ash is frozen, and her chest is pounding. The touch and intimacy Guide has given her is something so different from what she’s had.
Guide approaches slowly. Ash is spellbound, but before Guide can reach her, she flinches. Leaving the platform without saying another word.
Ash returns to the passengers, where a level of hopelessness has set in. Matt feels like he’s losing control of the situation. Both Mosse and Gab seem to have lost track of, or put doubt into the mission of getting home.
Ash connects with Matt, despite his calm and diplomatic demeanor, he is in deep fear of losing his daughter. Terrified of the prospect of just disappearing from her life. Ash commits to bringing them all home despite the cost.
Act 3 - A Kiss 🔗
Ash begins the work of descending to the lowest platforms. Each time she returns, she understands the locals more and her fellow passengers less.
The challenge is twofold. She needs to solve the puzzles at the lowest layers, and help both Gab and Mosse see what they actually seek isn’t here on the platforms (while slowly losing the ability to understand them).
Eventually the train is ready to move again. But as the group makes their way back to the train. A path back to the center platforms opens up to Ash. Ash breaks from the group and goes to visit Guide, feeling that something is still amiss.
Guide explains that, for most people, the train line is the way forward. But some people move vertically. Guide has been summoned to take the next step in their vertical journey. But that means this platform will be without a steward.
If a station has no steward, lost passengers have no guide, and the platforms, their inhabitants, and eventually the track itself will collapse.
Ash contemplates the cost. If she doesn’t step onto the train, Ash’s life at home will end. Her ‘home’ body will collapse the moment the train moves seemingly without reason and Andrew will suffer tremendous pain. A man she loves, one that hasn’t done anything wrong. That life would be done, and Ash can never go back.
Ultimately Ash makes her decision. She puts the frog mask back on Guide and kisses them. Guide is able to move on (a giant lifts them away) and Ash takes on the role of the Stations steward, sending the other passengers back home.