You travel beyond Thunderdome despite the chipper warnings of a talking dog.

You follow a broken road that leads only in a single direction. Behind you only the black nothingness of despair.

A sign stretches across the road. Its original message obscured with an ominous warning scrawled in blood.

“NOT KANSAS”

A chill penetrates your body. You kill a passing wizard for his cloak. With his dying breath he utters a curse but the words you choose to hear are gibberish.

Ahead a man is tied upside down to a post. A crude mockery of a scarecrow. He has no eyes or tongue but you hear his whispers inside your head.

A child appears by your side… no, a man no taller than your waist. He clutches a length of rope, the other end tied to the head of a lion dragging behind him.

Through a crooked smile and blackened teeth he sucks at a lollipop. His gaze turns to your cloak and soon fear fills his deadened eyes.

He glances back at the scarecrow and mutters “the road is a liar” then shuffles off into an ash covered cornfield.

Ahead the road forks. A signpost offers a City of Jewels to the left, Plain of Despair to your right, and a blank sign points to your feet.

Looking down, you can make out words carved faintly into the uneven yellowed bricks. “You have no choices, the road is a circle.”

Here among unfamiliar ground, the wisdom of a coin is the only guide you can truly trust.

Taking the right fork, you soon come upon a man in a silver suit seated at a barren table, drinking from an empty soda bottle.

He frowns at you, then picks a pair of spotless white galoshes from beside him and hands them to you.

“For the puddles.”

He waves you away, clearly intent on finishing his drink.

A sunless sky dims behind you, urging you forward. Soon colorless fields give way to regimental arrays of perfectly trimmed trees.

The road becomes a parody of a funhouse. Crimson liquid oozes from between the bricks;

bubbling and popping with the sound of mocking laughter;

filling the depressions;

surrounding you in blood.

Remembering the galoshes in your hand, you ease them over tattered shoes while your reflection stares back at you from a mirror of blood.

Gingerly you cross through a crimson sea to higher ground. The road ahead snakes into fractured cliffs. Fading footprints mark your passage.

A hot air balloon drifts low overheard, a figure leans over the basket and gestures you towards a narrow passage between the rocks.

Sharp rocks tear at your cloak as you squeeze yourself through a final crack.

You rejoin the ruined road and descend into hills of golden grass.

The yellow bricks become sparse as the road narrows to no more than a dirt path. On a hill ahead you see a muddy hovel adorned in shards of emerald glass.

Desiccated corpses of a dozen crows hang from the eaves, swaying in a nonexistent breeze to ward you away.

Through grime caked windows you glimpse a fleeting figure. Suddenly you find yourself bathed in shadow as a silhouette eclipses the sky.

Confusion rapidly gives way to joists and floorboards. Your last sensations are tiny hands tugging at your feet, tearing at the crimson galoshes.

The words of the dying wizard become suddenly clear:

“In Which Mel ‘Mad Max’ Gibson Finds Himself Unexpectedly Deceased Via a Falling House” echoes in your head.

Then blackness.