“If something breaks, it has to stay broken for everyone. If not, maybe you dreamed it, and that’s that.”
Breaking walls and floors is the most talked-about and least proven feat among wanderers: opening with your own hands a path that Level 0 does not offer, whether a corridor of your own, a hole in the slab, or a wall that no longer closes. Anyone who tries finds that the walls of Level 0 hold out better than they look.
What people say
One woman says she opened a crack in a plaster partition with a heavy tool and found it the same when she came back. Others say that the next day the wall was whole. Someone speaks of a sunken floor that wasn’t there when they woke.
Everyone agrees on the rule of the broken: if something is truly broken, whoever arrives afterward has to see it too. That is why wanderers who band together to dig demand witnesses.
Displacement
Two forces collide here. Displacement rewrites chunks when their time runs out, and with them whatever was standing. A stabilized chunk holds, while one that isn’t anchored takes with it whatever you opened. Wanderers know there is no point boring through where the place is about to move.
How you would try
- Pick a partition, not a load-bearing wall. Thick walls give the same sound to any blow.
- Count on the noise, because every blow travels through the air of the floor.
- Anchor the chunk before you start.
- If you use the Fastenings, remember they are for putting things up, not for tearing them down.
Connections
If breaking were possible, the gap above the drop ceiling and the pits would stop being places that Level 0 gives you and become routes that a wanderer opens. It is the kind of idea that moves groups to organize, but for now it remains a rumor.