THE SIGHT WHICH GREETED HIM upon his arrival in the Backroads sent a shiver through him. Color! But not vibrant, healthy color. No. The colors he saw were dull and faded. Like an ancient tapestry known only in the imagination of the dead.

  'I don't have time to figure this out!' he cursed to himself before he ran.

  He did want to understand why the Backroads were suddenly so colorful, but he simply did not have the time. He rushed through the ill-defined pathways of the Backroads with all the haste and muscle-memory he had in store. Which normally was tricky in the best of times. Now, with the colors blinding him, his speed was hampered. Also not helping his progress was the nature of the pathways themselves. Each step he took seemed to bend them in directions unnatural to his human eyes.

  'Focus, focus--' he urged himself. 'The command center portal should be up ahead.' He continued to run on the semi-familiar path yet when he came upon the place the portal should be, he instead found nothing. A dead end. 'What is going on? Shouldn't the portal be here? I must've taken a wrong turn...'

  He turned around and ran back to the nearest path edge in order to get a better understanding of what was going on. 'It is different!' he noticed. 'The pathways... did they shift?!' he started his way on finding a new pathway to the command center. He focused his will and closed his eyes. He steadied his breathing. Tried to clear his mind of gutter-clutter. Breathe-in- breathe-out.

  Resuming his pathfinding, the correct route came to him after several additional but thankfully brief, albeit immensely frustrating, dead ends. Hearing his name be whispered from somewhere beyond the color, where the former dark still held sway, he stepped through the portal to the command center once he found it and put to his back whatever strange event had occurred. That would be a problem for the Wardens, he thought.

  Emerging from the Backroads and onto the real roads, the splendor of nature surrounded him. Fresh air. Normal colors. The wind.

  Around the encampment people worked hard. He saw groups of people loading automotron bodies and their parts into a wagon. Even people nowhere near the wagon carried in their hands what they could just to plop the salvage onto the wagon. The work looked tedious. He knew it was vital work he had ordered. Yet he was happy it was not him who was performing the work. He had his own problems to fret over.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  "Guys!" he shouted as he entered the war room. He had to let them know of the possible danger from the Backroads. "The Backroads are colorful!"

  "Colorful?" Simulacrum asked.

  "Yes! Like a bleak rainbow. So, not, like, super colorful. But lots more than typically. What is with it?" he said.

  "We do not know. Research will be needed into why this is. Have you brought the resources?"

  "I have. I will drop them off into the Spirit Core now," he told them already on his way to the basement.

  Walking into the basement level, he saw something he had never seen before -- people in the center!

  'Who are all these people? Order initiates? That was what Sigma-Prime, and I decided on, right? I'm surprised people actually wanted to join,' he mused.

  As he made his way into the Spirit Core Processor chamber, several people he (sort of) recognized from the camp greeted him. He made a polite wave back but kept interaction to a minimum. Later, he thought, it would be nice to host a group meal and get to know everyone.

  He entered the Spirit Processor room. The complex machine before him which had many tubes and wires jutting in and out from it at odd angles looked smoother than last time. Less bulk. Fewer exposed paneling. He had only been gone for a few days and yet it did seem as though Sigma-Prime had made progress on her tinkering. Remembering the process from last time, he still had to call in Sigma a couple of times just so he knew he was dumping the strange materials inside the correct way. The last thing he wanted to do was to cause this thing to explode. Or implode. Or some other 'plode' which he was too ignorant of to understand.

  "Correct. Pull that lever. Good," Sigma-Prime said as she directed him through the process. "Now, open the door. On front. There, yes. Good. Dump it all in -- yeah, like that. No need to be delicate. The button, now. Good."

  He followed the instructions given and so it was not long before the resources he brought with him were inside the machine.

  "Are they okay?" he asked of the materials he dumped into the machine, the Generic Fae Matter, the Batter Rocks, and the Ancient Tech Mesh. "I got turned around a couple of times. Then, with the weird colors... can you still make use of them?"

  Sigma-Prime made some odd noises. "Scanning... scanning... scanning," she said with a fit of sparks. "Determination: the quality has been degraded but should still result in usable energy."

  "Oh... well, that's good," he said, awkwardly not knowing what else to do.

  "Verily," she noted back.

  "What not?" he asked. "It will take a few hours for the Backroads chamber to warm-up. Is there..."

  Not able to finish his sentence, he thought about Colonel Winters's notion of having his workspace open to others and so he said anew, "Should I have office hours?"