So I'm being kidnapped, but not necessarily against my will. I'm in the back of a van with a row what looks like white waterproof sleeping bags, standing on end from floor to ceiling, packed with nothing that looks like bodies.

We stop, someone tells me to get out. They hand me a bag, telling me "file this under Ilvan," and push me up a flight of stairs. The bag feels like it's light enough to have been packed full of cotton, but I'm careful with it nonetheless.

At the top of the stairs, the door opens to what looks like a penthouse suite, except on the second floor in a nondescript warehouse building. What an interior decorator might do if they had too much space and too much money.

I walk around, trying to find a filing system, or a door, or some sort of receptacle for my strange cargo. I walk by a single filing cabinet, seemingly out of place amongst everything else. It's labeled "I" at the top. I open it, and lo and behold, it has folders in it. I decide to open up my sleeping bag.

It's contents are a single map, relatively new by the quality of the paper, with a slight red mark circled towards its center, a small, unmarked back of shiny metal gears and cogs, and a piece of wood with what looks like an intricate circuit diagram.

"What do you think those are?" a woman's voice asks. I turn around to find a hard, impatient stare.

"I don't know. Looks like the pieces of a broken kid's toy."

"You're very wrong. Look again. I'll be back later."

I pore over the map, the gears, the wood. The map is some place I've never been, never even heard of. I place it aside. The gears are more interesting. They're of a metal like nothing I've ever seen before.

The most interesting is the inscribed piece of wood. Upon closer inspection, it's not a diagram for electricity, but instead a complex web of ideas and relationships that seem to indicate a different level of meaning from each point you start from. I can just about gather the meaning of one aspect, when I sense the woman brooding behind me again.

"Do you understand it?"

"I understand how it works, I think. Whoever drew this was amazing."

"The Ilvans have been trying to send us a message for years, but it's been falling on deaf ears. If you can translate what they're telling us, then you're on the team."

"If I can't?"

"Then your services are no longer required."

I'm left with a cold feeling amongst warm woods and colors and dead silence. I start back in on the diagram.

Then it hits me. They aren't gears and cogs. They're all similar in shape, but they all have different radii, teeth, color, etc. Those are the Ilvans themselves, those that carved the wood like this.

Then I wake up. Cold. Hung over.