The distant sounds of traffic drifted faintly through the industrial district as a persistent cough echoed along a narrow concrete corridor. A lone man walked through the passage at an unhurried pace, his footsteps carrying softly beneath the dim lights fixed overhead. He wore a dark green jumpsuit, and a protective mask concealed the lower half of his face while one hand rested against it between each cough. After several more steps he finally arrived before a locked metal door. Without hesitation he reached for the handle, pushed the door inward, and quietly stepped inside the laboratory. He had entered intending to collect something left behind, but almost immediately his attention shifted elsewhere. Something resting upon the workplace drew his eyes before anything else, and within seconds he understood that it deserved far more attention than the task that had originally brought him there.
He glanced back over his shoulder, carefully checking that nobody had followed him, before quietly pulling the door shut once more. A calendar hung beside it, its pages lying perfectly still against the wall. The printed date read 1st July, 1986. Satisfied that he was alone, the man slowly approached the central workplace where the remains of an earlier experiment still lay untouched. Beside the same transparent container Genido and Juson had worked with rested scattered grains of blue and red Zerre, but something about them immediately felt wrong. They no longer remained inside the container where they had originally been placed. Instead, both substances had somehow escaped and spread themselves across the smooth surface of the table. The man, Itagawa, carefully pushed the empty container aside before extending one hand over the scattered grains. The instant his palm hovered above them, the tiny particles responded unnaturally. They slid away from one another without any visible force, forming a shallow circular depression in the middle of the workplace. At first the crater remained no larger than a coin, but within moments it slowly widened as the blue and red grains continued retreating in opposite directions, exposing more and more of the surface beneath them. Watching the impossible phenomenon unfold, Itagawa instinctively stepped backward.
His curiosity quickly overcame his caution. Walking toward the table positioned in the centre of the room, he picked up a coffee mug that had been abandoned there earlier. Holding it firmly, he cautiously returned toward the growing crater while never allowing his eyes to leave the strange opening. The movement of the Zerre had not stopped, yet nothing about it suggested hostility. Encouraged by that thought, he tossed the mug directly toward the centre of the depression. The instant the cup crossed above the opening, every light inside the laboratory flickered violently once. Before the mug could strike the surface below, it simply vanished. No sound followed. No fragments remained. It disappeared so completely that even Itagawa found himself staring blankly at the empty space where it should have landed. His gaze instinctively shifted toward the locked door before returning to the workplace. By then the crater had changed once again. At its centre something darker had begun to emerge, resembling a tiny opening where no opening should have existed.
Before he could move closer to examine it, a familiar voice echoed from outside the laboratory.
"Itagawa!"
Genido called his name while walking steadily toward the room.
Reacting instantly, Itagawa stepped forward and placed a large opaque tray directly over the mysterious opening, hiding every trace of it before Genido could reach the doorway. He quickly collected his mask from the table along with a perfectly transparent glass cube whose edges remained unnaturally sharp. By the time Genido reached the entrance, Itagawa had already left the room, carrying both objects with him without offering any explanation. Silence settled over the laboratory once again. Beneath the tray, however, the impossible crater continued growing unseen as the scattered blue and red Zerre shifted restlessly beneath the metal cover, slowly widening the hidden opening toward something no ordinary experiment should ever have created.