"What do you mean, there's no hole above us?"
"Exactly what I said." Kraft touched the white rock wall in a daze. They were definitely standing in a tunnel two people wide and tall. In theory, the Present World shouldn't be all that different.
"Over there, it's all earth and stone. Not a single gap."
When he tried to rise, rock filled every inch of the corresponding space in the Present World. The solid, unified stone rejected another Plane Shift in the simplest and most decisive way possible.
Kraft didn't want to add another unsolved human fossil mystery for third-rate magazines to write about at length in the future.
"So there should've been an identical cave 'above' us. Wait, why are we calling it 'above'?"
"It's just a label. We could call where we live every day 'outside the mirror' if you prefer. Did you feel like you were falling when we came through? If that had been a real distance, we'd be little better off than a salad tossed with rocks."
That wasn't hard to understand. Connecting it to the earlier, less-than-apt metaphor, William roughly grasped what he meant. "You're saying that 'outside the mirror' doesn't have a hole cut into it to match the one 'inside the mirror,' so we still can't get back?"
"Actually, we can. If you don't mind being wedged between solid rocks like a frozen fish in ice." Kraft corrected William's understanding, clarifying that the problem wasn't his personal technique. But the result was the same: they couldn't return to the Present World from here.
"Besides, the mirror analogy doesn't seem so apt now." Kraft held up the fire and looked around. "I think you can imagine them as two sheets of paper. When you write on the top one, roughly the same marks