As he spoke, Dumbledore "flickered" to Vaughn's side.
He grabbed Vaughn's hand and took him flying, "jumping" all the way and passing through the ceiling with ease.
The ceiling swept past Vaughn's eyes like an illusionary bubble.
The next instant, Vaughn found himself amid gray mist, with only a faint glow coming from "below."
He looked over instinctively and saw a crystalline Klein bottle "floating" within the boundless gray fog.
The room he had been in before—the training ground summoned by the Room of Requirement—flowed across the bottle's surface like a painting.
He stared at it in surprise and heard Dumbledore say slowly, "A meditation object records the last scene you were in at the moment it forms and manifests it in the aether. It has no other purpose; it merely provides you with an anchor!"
The gray mist was not truly mist, of course.
In essence, it was a transparent, constantly shifting phantom. It merely looked like fog because it was gray, drifting, and without any sense of substance.
"Getting lost is very common in the aether, where the concept of space is lost. There is one very obvious problem: we came in, but how do we get back out?"
"That is why anchor objects are necessary. They can help you determine your position and return to reality. You could say they are the foundation upon which modern alchemy has grown and flourished."
"In ancient times, alchemy was an extremely dangerous discipline. Who knew how many alchemists silently became lost in the aether, their bodies slowly weakening like those of vegetative patients until they died!"
At that moment, Vaughn was already flying through the gray mist under Dumbledore's guidance.
As he listened to Dumbledore's explanation, Vaughn followed the meditation method he had learned before and sensed the Klein bottle.