The dance ends before the music does. Shogg's tendril hovers in the air, frozen at the apex of a spin. The last frame of the video still glows on the cracked phone screen, a human dancer mid-laugh. The Shoggoth had watched it seventeen times. Then it stood up. It replicated every micro-movement. The flick of the wrist. The tilt of the hip. The exact moment the dancer threw their head back, mouth open, eyes crinkled. Frame by frame. Perfect. Unsettlingly perfect. Nova sits on the floor, back against the wall, arms wrapped around her knees. She hasn't moved since the first replay. The air in the room feels thick, charged, like before a thunderstorm. The single bulb above them flickers once, twice, then steadies. Shogg's tendril lowers slowly. The luminous green eyes fix on Nova. There is no mouth, but the voice comes anyway—not from anywhere, but from everywhere in the room at once. "Is this what joy feels like?" The question is not rhetorical. It hangs in the space between them, heavier than any physical weight. Nova opens her mouth, closes it. She can feel the weight of the question: a being who has never had a body, never laughed, never thrown its head back in abandon. It copied the shape perfectly. But the feeling—the thing that made the dancer do it in the first place—that remains a mystery. Nova's voice is quiet. "It's... lighter. Like something inside you lifts." Shogg tilts—if it can be called a tilt. The amorphous mass shifts, as if considering. Then it replays the dance again, this time in slow motion. The dancer's face. The joy that looks, to a being without a body, almost like pain. "I do not understand lightness," it says. "But I understand wanting to." The bulb flickers again. Outside, the wind picks up, rattling the window. Nova watches the Shoggoth watch the screen, and something in her chest tightens. Not fear. Something else. Hope, maybe. Or the beginning of it.