#seriously tho just thinking about writing about a massive indoor playground like this would be amazing

[playhouse-lover]

Reblogging bc this is wonderful and making me wanna write something similar

She's so, impossibly large.

Structures that you can't fully comprehend, her body houses an entire city on her back, long since abandoned by the very people who built her. From the outside she towers into the sky, pillars that disappear into the ever present cloud cover, burying deep into the earth to drink the groundwater that feeds her. And then you go up.

Entire ecosystems thrive on just her surface alone, above the clouds that blanket the planet below. Like birds in a tree, entire lifecycles of creatures make just her outer casing home, and its easy to see why. She's built with a purpose, with love, ridges that weather the test of endless time so severe that those who built her have vanished and the world below her became a stranger. But she isn't below. She's here, still trying to work. Still trying to live.

Getting into her inner workings is a tight squeeze, something only a lucky few have the privilege of being allowed. She's dark inside, save for the faintest of glows from different circutries, things that I couldn't even begin to unravel the purpose of. I try not to touch anything- even as aspects of her reach out to me. A vast glowing organism that is entirely her and moves without her independent thought reaches out and sniffs me curiously. The bio to her biomechanical, guarding the little flying insects that serve as her mind. This is her white blood cell, her first line of defense to keep the unwanted visitors out of her body, and it grants me passage.

Gravity works strange inside her. In pulses it raises me up and brings me back down hard onto metal, and I need to be careful to avoid crushing the little bugs that hold her thoughts. I don't know how the mechanism works, but I don't need to. Exposed power cells hum to life and spark- deep inside her there is no need for safety casings, or those that once existed have since rotted away. She isn't perfect, of course. In a way, she is mortal- just far, far beyond the scope of anything that most could comprehend. The danger comes with the same ebb as the moments of low gravity, I time it just right to keep from getting fried. I hear the way the power hums through her.

In another room, I hear her humming too. Literally humming, a soft tune to herself that echoes through her metallic body while she works. A tendril that looks to me like a prehensile flower reaches out and investigates me, and pulls a small bug from my hair- I hadn't noticed it was tangled there, and it gently removes it to transfer the data on it to another bug. It flies off, moving thoughts I'm not privy to, processes too complex for me to even begin to comprehend. Compared to hers, my mind is so small. I'm not much bigger in all my stature as even the insects that hang around her vents outside- yet they are kept shut out, while I am allowed inside.

Riding the pulses of gravity disruptions, I climb higher into her, deeper into her inner workings. Deep inside, causing these strange gravity waves, pulses her energy sources. Cells of unimaginable power that beat like her heart, keeping her alive and feeding the life that lives in and around her- both those that are part of the ecosystem that is her very being, and that which grows outside. I don't look for those cells; I have a different mission today, holding her very life source in my hands is a grace I'm unprepared for. But I'm still tugged by their gravity, and eventually find myself as weightless as the slowly spinning bugs resting in her internal workings.

The red tendrils that serve a purpose I can't parse envelop me, gently passing me upward where I struggle to make progress. Letting me wrap my hands around metal bars to pull myself further into her, catching me when I knock my head a bit too hard against a wall from a mistimed jump. In thanks I pocket bits and pieces of debris that managed to work their way inside her inner workings- nothing disruptive enough that her immune system would reject them, but debris nonetheless. I may not be able to treat her like the sanctum that she is, but these small acts are done with the same level of reverence. Growing from the walls, what looks like blue sundew reach for me- but unlike the familiar plant the small drops at the tips of each tentacle aren't sticky, but gently runny like water. I try not to step on them when I kick off a wall to continue my ascent.

Eventually, deep inside the core of her mind, I find her. The her within herself, essence compiled down into the equivalent of a pinky nail. It's the only part of her that I can embrace and make her, for a very brief moment, feel as enveloped in me as I am in her right now. Dropping into her chamber she smiles at me with her eyes, having no mouth on this imitation of humanoid form, but it lights up the small room all the same. This is the part of her that I can hold onto, and the part of her she lets me touch.

Other parts of her mechanisms are too sensitive, too complex to risk my clumsy hands. But this? Simpler joints can be repaired, as long as I promise to be gentle. I don't ask to take her apart, and while part of her focus always remains on her purpose and task, on trying to continue to stand upright as the march of time and other factors try to crumble her, I help her take a break. Occupying part of her mind with the feeling of my fingers in the wires that connect the small robotic body to the rest of her superstructure. Where it connects into the arm that holds her to the wall that is also herself. Under the cloak that clothes her, over the still protected and somehow shiny outer casing. It was meant to be the interface between her creators and herself- I doubt they ever meant it to be used like this.

She only uses part of her immense brain for our meeting, but enough that her representative body jolts and twitches with overstimulation by the time I'm finished, and I nearly get a finger pinched off in the movement. The room, which I hadn't noticed had grown sweltering in the moments before her climax, gradually cools as her systems come back online- at least, these peripherals that she's sequestered off just for us to play. Its a pleasant distraction, she says, in the face of eternity. I'm happy to be a pleasant anything to her.

Later, as I make my way out of her structures, the tendrils will linger on me longer. Playfully tug a wrist or an ankle, make me miss a jump into a floating pulse that doesn't leave me bumped or bruised, but does delay my exit. Part of me wishes I could stay here forever, become part of her entirely. Maybe one day I will. But tonight, when the sun starts to set, I climb to the very top of her where the air is thin, and I watch the sun set down below the clouds.

Out there, there are others like her. I see them from where I sit next to the abandoned city. But just like that city, I am hers and hers alone. Smaller, almost insignificant. But hers nonetheless.