Martyna walked up to her ill-fated friend, who was using her free hand to tinker with the device while listening to her mother's impatient heavy breathing through the phone. She was curious and eager to learn the apparently simple solution to their woes and see for herself whether it really worked. While looking at the console, her attention was caught by one of the knobs; the one used for setting the units of time for the dilation effect. It was set to… years? "That's weird," Martyna thought. "Did Julia just change it for some reason? I don't remember it looking like this." Her friend managed to find the "force remove module" button and swiftly proceeded to tap it. As Martyna tried to recall what exactly the knob looked like back when she was looking at it while her feet were inside the chamber - looking upside down, that is - Wiktor materialized on the floor of the locker room.

It wouldn’t exactly be appropriate to say that the girls recognized him; the identity of the person that appeared before them was more of an assumption - a reasonable one, given the circumstances, but hardly the result of any visual observation. The boy was naked and resembled a marble statue, both in the pigmentation of his skin and in the stiffness of his body. His pose had changed since the last time they saw him: he was no longer standing up. On the contrary, he was curled up and kneeling, with his arms resting on the ground and his face hidden between his legs, as if in deep prostration. His hair, once black, now resembled the unkempt fur of some Arctic creature or perhaps a pile of bonfire ashes. His skin, however, did not undergo any changes at all; it still seemed elastic and strong, and lacked any unsightly wrinkles - at least on the parts that were visible to the girls.

"Wiktor…?" Julia called out to him, timidly and cautiously at first, then with increasing agitation. "Wiktor! Are you alright?" She approached him, crouched down, and put her hand on his shoulder. "Why aren't you saying anything? Wiktor!"

After a few long seconds, his body twitched slightly in a delayed response to the touch. He  began to move, slowly and apparently with great difficulty, as if he was waking up from deep sleep and barely remembered how to control his muscles. As the girls gathered around and observed him with equal parts curiosity and anxiety, he raised his head, eyes wide open - though fixed on some unspecified point far in the distance - and revealed the withered face of a man who stayed awake far longer than any human was meant to.

His lips had lost all color and now blended into the paleness of his face. Shades of dark blue, red, and black surrounded his eyes, and covered the saggy, wrinkled skin below his lower eyelids. His eyebrows were as gray as what remained of the hair on his head. There was no emotion that could be read from his face, nor did he seem engaged in careful thought; he simply existed right then and there within a tired, tormented form, as if he got caught up in the cogs of a cosmically incomprehensible and inhumane machine that processed, absorbed, and integrated his psyche into a mathematical construct; as if he was a cosmonaut drifting powerlessly through the void of outer space; as if he had been awake during his own surgery.

It took a minute for Wiktor to familiarize himself with his surroundings. The locker room appeared to him small and cramped. There was movement all around; people. They were looking at him, talking to him; they seemed familiar. One - in particular.

As his eyes met Martyna's gaze, he screamed.