"I can't breathe"

I saw the shadow person emerging from the depths of the sea below us; I could see its eyes, again, watching me.


"The universe is a very forgiving place, even if he does commit an error," the cat continued on, scratching at a corner of the room. A few drops of water ran down the wall where the cat had made a puncture in the surface of the room. "It’s very forgiving, but the real trick is convincing the universe to forget that it ever happened in the first place."


And then the cat was gone, and laughter filled the air around me, and an enormous hand rose up from the depth and broke through the now almost completely transparent walls of the room that I was in and plucked me up, holding me over the sea. Though I could no longer see the shadow of the angel, with its glowing red eyes, I knew that something like that was examining me.


"Failure," a voice said.


"Concentrate!" another voice demanded.