Chapter 2: Nonsense

  Tears fell down Skylar’s face as he stood there in his military salute, fist on his chest, completely not ready to face whatever was coming next. He wondered if he would die, or if he survived what his life might look like. There were just too many questions to form a completely coherent thought. But slowly, he lowered his fist from his chest, and turned his back on the portal of Earth.

  Above him, endlessly, a kaleidoscope of shifting pathways and tunnels spiraled incomprehensibly. Why would there even be walkways that went upwards? He can’t walk vertically. Or did gravity have no meaning here?

  He shrugged, shook his head in disbelief, and started slowly walking forward. After a moment, he felt a strangeness worse than anything else grip his chest. The walkway in front of him became segmented along the walls. Everything had a crosshatch grid on it now. Lines appeared to separate vertically and horizontally. He felt a sense of uneasiness along the plane of the lines across his body. On a hunch, he stood in between a vertical segment, and ducked his head down to avoid being in line with a horizontal segment. Then, to his surprise, everything started shifting like a rubics cube.

  He was inside an inverted rubics cube that had an infinite number of cubes, all shifting at once in a spherical pattern around the stable block he segmented himself in. Nausea overtook him, and he puked on his hands and knees. Gravity was pulling him in every direction, like his head was spinning in a circle, while each of his limbs was on a different roller coaster. He realized just now that the taxidermy heads had disappeared before the hallways started to extend. Time felt irrelevant, like he had been there for hours or days. He shook his head and caught his breath from puking.

  “This doesn’t make any fucking sense!” he yelled at the nonsense around him.

  The spinning and rotating pathways and cubic partitions of reality all around him stopped shifting after several minutes. By that time, he had almost caught his breath. He went to stand up, and multiple leg cramps made him fall to the ground. He hadn’t pushed his training to the intensity of that sprint, ever. The hallway oriented itself into an endless three directional path, with him at the middle point.

  He slowly got back up to a standing position, and he started to walk in a random direction. The hallway behind him closed itself by arching the forward walkway up into the air and twisting it in a spiral that made it impossible to traverse. Its metal bending and screeching sound was eerie and made chills continually run down Sky’s back.

  “Oh God. Why did I crawl in here?” His voice echoed back from a hundred different directions, with different pitches and intensities. He stopped walking. What was the point in traveling a distance if distance was not a concept that even had form in this place? He threw his arms in the air in a massive shrug, and kept an eye on his surroundings. Not that it would help.

  “Why couldn’t I have stepped through the portal and woken up somewhere cool?” He barely whispered it, but it still echoed back at him.

  A final delayed echo of his first statement came back really loud, “Oh God. Why did I crawl in here?”

  “Great,” he said with irritation.

  Suddenly, things started to shift again. But not the way they had before. It was like the first thing he saw, where the pathways were swerving in different directions. He felt even though he was standing still that he was traveling across space and time itself, barely held together. With a lurch, he was ejected to the side, spun in circles, and flown straight backwards. He braced for impact with another hallway or walkway, and was able to reorient himself in mid-air to see where he was flying. He was headed toward a spike.

  The spike was the result of about fifteen different round circular tunnels branching off from the main one that he found himself inside. They all split equally around, leaving the center leftover as a jagged spike right down the middle of the original pathway. It was a fork in the road, one that would impale him by the chest if he didn’t do something.

  He flailed around again. It was like he was in zero gravity, but still flying at high speeds. At the end of each of the fifteen pathways he could now see they all ended in a portal. He didn’t have the time to analyze them, and half of them were just pure darkness. That would definitely not be good. Then, he saw it. A portal with pristine landscapes, beautiful flowers, and a crystal clear lake.

  That would have to be good enough. He prepared for the spike, and when it was in range, he kicked it with all his might to redirect his force toward that portal. It went way better than he expected. All that forward momentum was turned toward the portal he chose instead of him being cut apart by the edges of each pathway. They were perfectly cut into this realm, and the speed he was going would have made it pretty harmful. Somehow, whatever force was flying him toward an exit listened to his kick, and shot him out into the grasslands on top of a green hill above a lake.

  As soon as his body entered the new portal, he hoped its similarity indicated that he was back on Earth. But something was wrong. Before he even hit the ground to tumble, an unseen force crushed his chest, his mind, and everything he knew into unconsciousness.

  He awoke with a groan of pain.

  “Oh what happened?” He didn’t recognize the croak that came out instead of his regular voice.

  Everything ached. He lifted an arm to hold his throbbing head, but found that he was so dehydrated that he could hardly speak. There was two dull stabbing pains in his back, just under his ribcage on each side.

  “My kidneys are throbbing, that’s nice.”

  It had been a few years since the last time he injured himself due to dehydration. Working out in the summer heat followed by an illness can do that to people. He sat up slowly, feeling like he might pass out again. Had it been multiple days? Why was he feeling like he was about to die of thirst?

  He tried to stand up, but the muscle soreness of his lower back muscles, legs, and glutes was enough to make him stop for a second and look around. There was a lake a few hundred feet down a steep grassy slope from where he landed. There was no portal to be found, and as he moved, the grass just stood back up as if it was completely unaffected by his presence. Even where he lay for maybe a couple days straight there was no indentation at all. He was training to be a scientist, so things like that really caught his eye.

  He grabbed a blade of grass, and went to pull on it. It nearly cut his finger open. It did not break off like he expected. He pulled more carefully, and harder. He couldn’t break a single blade of grass? He wrapped a longer blade around a finger, and grabbed with both hands and pulled. But his internal experience warned him not to exert himself any more. He was starting to have chest pain. He took a few deep breaths, and slowly got up.

  He felt like total dogshit. He took a few steps toward the lake, and the grass at this point was starting to really freak him out. Each step took a few moments to sink down, despite the grass only being four to six inches tall. The grass was tough enough to hold him up for a couple seconds. It was like walking on loam. On his walk down to the lake, he found that he had cried blood that had dried into scabs that drained to the right and almost reached his bottom ear that was pressed into the ground. He found evidence of a sunburn that had somehow healed already, with his skin flaking off on one side of his body revealing a slightly darker complexion.

  “What in the hell?”

  He was wearing a pair of thin black cargo pants, and a loose black t-shirt. He knew he would be around his Uncle’s workplace, and understood that looking weird might cause him difficulties. But he still refused to completely hide his attitude and so he wore a completely gothic wardrobe that day. He scratched his elbow where the sunburn was, and his skin flaked away. It really looked like a two week old sunburn that maybe was exposed for a second time to the sun.

  He still felt that same pressure in his chest and head like he had never felt before. What was it that made him lose consciousness upon entering this world? Why would his eyes bleed? He felt a little heavy, but a slight increase in gravity wouldn’t cause it. It could literally be anything, if his knowledge of space and time was any metric, he didn’t have the information to make an accurate assessment of the why’s and how’s. What he did know, was that he was as thirsty as ever, and also hungry.

  There was a suspicious lack of any bugs, birds, sounds of nature, or anything other than light weather patterns. It was eerie to see only plant life, and a perfectly still lake. No bubbles rose, no fish could be seen despite the clarity being forty feet. No other lake had he ever seen was clear enough to see that deep. But, there was nothing in it, at first glance.

  He knew he was supposed to boil water before drinking it, but it was just too crystal clear and he was too thirsty to care. He collapsed on the sand next to the lake to get closer to the water. His knees hit the sandy bank with a crack. He fully expected to sink into the sand, not strike it like it was concrete. He yelled out in pain, and put his hands down to break his momentum toward the ground.

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  “What kind of sand is this hard?” He croaked out.

  His hands didn’t kick up any more debris from the bottom of the lake, it was just as solid as the sand his knees were on. He scooped up a double handful of water to take a drink, but when he lifted his hands up he fell forward into the lake with the weight of the water. It was like a thirty pound dumbbell in his hands.

  He panicked. If this wasn’t water, he might be in serious danger. The only liquid that heavy he could think of was Mercury. But this was pristine and clear. He frowned in frustration at how fragile he was feeling. He wasn’t even human at this point, he was sub-human. Grass he couldn’t break, and water he couldn’t lift without bracing himself was only the beginning too. He knew nothing about this world. Maybe it was a good thing there weren’t any bugs or wildlife yet. That could be a big problem.

  He lay there face down in the shallow end of the lake, easily floating on the very surface as his legs stretched out on the hard sand. He hesitated for as long as his breath could hold in his fragile state before taking a gulp of the cold refreshing water around him. He slowly filled his mouth halfway, and swallowed.

  The cold sensation enveloped the inner surface of his stomach with a sharp stabbing pain, and then a moment later he felt better. He felt much better. Exhilarated even.

  He pushed his hands a foot deep to reach the bottom of the lake bed, and shoved his upper body out of the water by arching his back.

  “Wow! I feel so much better.” Then, he started laughing at the absurdity.

  He laid back down on top of the water and rolled onto his back. He smeared the blood from his face with his heavy wet hand, and the blood came right off. Thoughts of blood smelling sharks of the ocean on his world flashed through his mind and he started screaming and flailing. Despite being able to see inside the lake quite a distance, if he was weaker than a blade of grass, he wasn’t willing to face a piranha or a leech, or any other alien species that his blood might invite.

  His adrenaline spiked as a result of his mild panic, but he calmed himself after standing back up at the edge of the lake. He noticed some extra vascularity and muscle definition in his forearm, and on a hunch decided to check his abs.

  Somehow, his already low bodyfat had reduced even further, and he was totally shredded. He wasn’t large by any means, but his fat was almost completely gone. His stomach was growling now that he thought about his fitness routine.

  “Dam, I couldn’t have left a little more fat on me to prepare for an emergency?”

  He laughed and shook his head. How ironic that achieving such a goal would cause him to have so little reserves that he couldn't fall asleep for a single night without starving. He tried to come up with a logical or scientific explanation for the dense water and the grass and the sand he couldn’t budge, but nothing came. Different laws of physics were the only thing he could think of. But, if it was all different here, could he ever adapt to such differences? Would the rain beat him to death? Would a butterfly bite his head off? At this point, anything went. But he decided not to speculate about anything until he could see it with his own eyes. Until a pattern was clear, extrapolating was just going to drive him insane.

  But, a single gulp of this water and his body immediately was rehydrated? That might be the most insane thing he ever put inside himself. He clapped his hands. “Okay. Time to find something to eat.”

  He walked at a pace that would conserve his energy, not going up or downhill, or too far from the lake. It looked remarkably like Earth. It was like he was in a different country with slightly different vegetation. Otherwise things were beautiful and peaceful here. It was quite amazing. Whatever pressure he had felt upon entering this world, it was pretty much gone. That or he was adapting to it.

  It took him a couple hours to walk to the other side of the lake, and even then he still hadn’t seen a single animal, bug, or sign of life outside of vegetation. Even the soil looked pretty dead. As a biologist, he really expected to find some kind of ecosystem. He decided that there was an ecosystem, he just couldn’t understand it yet. Life was here, obviously. He just didn’t understand yet.

  There was a tiny trickle of water leaving the ground uphill from him, and draining into the lake ever so slowly. He walked up the stream a few steps to see what was there. The water had dug a crevice into the hillside over time, and inside that crevice looked to be a pocket of overhang. Somewhere shaded, like the beginning of what could be a cave. He couldn’t believe he didn’t think to do it earlier, but he bent down to pick up a small pebble. Sure enough, it was incredibly dense too. It was like a giant magnet was pulling it down as he tried to lift it. Eventually he was able to do it, and it too was a hundred times heavier than it should be.

  He hiked up to the point where the ground overhung the water trickling toward the lake, hoping to find a mushroom in the dark alcove. His hope was also filled with dread though. If the only plant life he could eat was mushrooms, he would still die. Plus, a mushroom in a place like this couldn’t even be nibbled on if it were going to be a deadly variety. That just, wasn’t a good idea. Maybe he’d rub his skin with it first or something.

  The landscape and everything reminded him of the scientific theories about what a planet would look like after very specific apocalypse scenarios. Where one form of life dominates everything else. But, what could have caused such widespread destruction to eliminate life altogether but also destroy the fungi? Fungi are extremely resilient to such situations. None of this made any sense. Not yet anyways.

  He really missed his friends and his Uncle. A pang of sadness stopped him in his tracks and threatened to flood him with despair. What was this place? Why did he have to crawl through a portal like that?

  Suddenly, the ground shook. Then stopped. Then it shook again harder. Smaller rumblings followed the bigger ones, as it began to quake. He got away from any loose soil, and into a clearing where none of the oddly pine shaped trees would fall on him, and he sat down. The whole lake rippled in vibration.

  The pressure in his chest grew rapidly, and his head felt like two men were standing on it ready to explode his skull and crush his brain to paste. He groaned in pain, and the pressure and earthquake just increased in intensity further and further until his eyes were slammed shut and he was writhing on the ground in pain. The ground beneath him was shaking so hard he was being jostled toward the lake. Soon, his body started to lay on top of the water, but he grabbed ahold of a river stone so he didn’t float into the middle.

  Whatever was going on, he would fight against it. He breathed heavy breaths, and pushed against the force in his mind and body.

  “What is, happening?”

  Something blotted out the sun into a twilight. He shot his eyes open, and half the sky was filled with a brown spotted, mass. It was moving. The thunderous rumbles of the ground shook with its every footfall. It’s elephant like skin and hundreds of hooved legs slowly worked their way across the horizon. The beast was so large, he couldn’t see the end of it on either side. And he realized then, the crushing pain he was feeling in his very being was directed at whatever it was. Its very existence was crushing him. It was all he could do to hold onto his mind and sanity and wait for the thing to pass him by. It felt like an hour had passed, but it had left as quickly as it came. The pain in his mind and body was gone, and he recovered over the next few minutes. More blood had come out of his eyes.

  He washed his face off, and took another mouthful of water. He took an extra gulp for good measure. It didn’t feel right just having a tiny sip of water for an entire day even if it was more, watery?

  Suddenly, as his third total mouthful of water entered his body, a shock hit his system. A menu opened up in front of his eyes like a video game.

  “Initializing…”

  “Welcome Human of the Other Realm.”

  “New Title: Crushed by Abomination.”

  “You have been exposed to an Abomination’s Aura at Stage 0 and survived, then you went back for more.” Wait. Aura? That was a thing? Despite how stressed out he was, that sounded like magic.

  Then, the sky blue screen in his vision turned into a menu. It had at the top, “Skylar Kochenki, Human of the Other Realm,” and a few tab spaces. The first tab was titles, and the second was just labeled, “Soul Orb.” There was a grayed out “Stats” tab, but it had a lock icon over it. He waited to see if there was anything else. There was a lot of blank space, and he was still in shock at everything that had happened. Nevertheless, he sat up and got as comfortable as he could on the embankment of the lake and mentally tapped on Soul Orb to see what it was.

  Immediately his vision went dark when he tapped Soul Orb, and in front of him in the darkness was a sphere. It was hardly visible, but gave a barely perceivable glow of light. It was like a giant soap bubble floating in the air at night time. But, Soul Orb had some connotations to it. Was he looking at his own Soul? Why was it a sphere?

  His mind went back to the Abomination that walked by and nearly crushed him, and a faint Glyph of some kind highlighted itself on the outside of the Soul Orb. Intuitively, he knew the two events were connected. His experience with that thing left a mark on him. It didn’t necessarily feel like a bad thing, and if he learned anything from video games, it looked he may have gotten some kind of achievement for it.

  He tried to exit the vision of his Soul Orb, but struggled. He didn’t exactly have a physical body in this place to do anything with. He was just a floating consciousness of sorts. He tried to shake his head awake for several moments, until he really started to freak out. He tried to yell, but nothing worked. When he thought about the menu system, he felt the Soul Orb tab was toggled on. So, he toggled it off like a switch. As soon as he did, he was back to where he was with a mysterious menu in his face.

  He quickly selected the Titles tab which had a dropdown to view his title.

  “Crushed By Abomination: Your Stage 0 Soul was nearly obliterated by an Abomination. It has grown back stronger than ever.”

  “Huh. Well, I guess I have bragging rights?” He expected to get something for having achieved the Title, not for it to just sit there.

  “Wait. I have a Soul?!” The reality of the situation overwhelmed him again. The sadness of losing Earth and the people he loved, the pain he was experiencing, the hunger, and now this system interface. It was just too much. All he wanted to do was find something to eat. But in the back of his mind, he also was feeling guilty about how excited he was to be a proper magic wielder. It was a lifelong dream that he could never achieve. Magic.

  His hunger drove him to shoo the menu out of his face and start his search for something to eat again.