[Opening scene and first page of this drama.]

"You have awoken in what resembles a hospital examination room. It smells like a mixture of birthday cake and sewage. Beyond the curtain, a strange, metallic tapping sound is growing steadily louder. You can't remember how you got here, but you remember your son. You don't know where he is."

[Fern has picked up a painting, a clown painting. Gaze into the clown abyss and it stares back.]

"It's as if more than a hundred different voices are chattering away in your brain as you gaze around the room, but one intrusive thought pattern drowns out all reason: that painting. That terrible painting of a clown. It is as if some artist only hastily scribbled it as some sort of placeholder or in-joke and was ultimately too tired to do anything more interesting in its place. It is awful and you need it. Why do you need it? You want to hold it. Why can't you get it out of your head? Talk to the clown painting - what?!- lick clown painting - why would - clown painting - there are more important thi- clown painting clown painting - YOUR HEAD IT'S IN YOUR HEAD IT'S GOING TO EAT THE BACK OF YOUR EYEBAcome on turn that clown upside downIT'S SCREAMING"

[Second look at the painting]

"...What were you doing? Something about a clown painting? What clown painting? This is an enlarged, framed photograph of a...bedbug? No...that is definitely a crab. Not the edible kind. Well, probably technically edible, just not the kind anybody would look at and immediately want to steam with a can of beer (this is the right way to prepare crab, never boil them, it gets all rubbery and fishy and just awful. AWFUL.)

Okay...you're just gonna put this neatly back on the wall and -"

[Fern has just left a room and returned to a main hallway]

"Back in the hall, you take a moment to reflect on what you've been through so far. You woke up mere moments ago in a strange place, full of strange things. Some of them want to hurt you, but they don't even sound like they're aware of it. Other things, apparently, are on your side. It feels too real to be a delusion, but it doesn't feel like the "right kind" of real. You can worry about what planet you're on later, though; some of the things here may or may not have taken your child from you and are going to do who the hell knows what in the name of some crackpot mockery of medicine."