Less than a minute after the creature disappeared through the crack in the air, Seth noticed that there were less people in the room than there was a moment ago. As he scanned the room for any doorway that they might have escaped through, he watched as a random Indian woman fell into the ground through an orange-colored crack in the floor.
Seth sprinted over to the spot the woman fell through, only to find that there was no crack to be found. He scrambled over the smooth floor looking for a seam or something to signify a trapdoor she could have fallen through. Murmurs turned to shouts in the room as others started to disappear through multicolored cracks in the floor.
Some ran for the walls, banging on them until their fists were bloody and voice hoarse, searching desperately for an escape from the bizarre cracks.
Seth kept running to the nearest person, only to arrive a second too late as they continued to vanish through the mysterious cracks. There were fewer and fewer left in the room and Seth was feeling hopeless. He could do to change his situation and that fact was obvious to Seth. He finally stopped moving and watched the ground under him, accepting his fate. Soon enough, a void black crack opened up under Seth and a feeling of weightlessness overtook him.
As Seth fell, he flailed desperately at the pitch-black space around him that felt like syrup. This sort of freefall made time seem to stand still until Seth suddenly found himself sprawled out on some sort of red and grey sand.
“Thank Christ its ov-” he was interrupted as his body abruptly made him release everything in his stomach.
He shortly turned to his back, feeling sick after his trip through the void. Eventually his queasiness pasted, and he got up to check out the surroundings. It seems the crack spit him out in an unfamiliar landscape consisting of nothing but grey and crimson sand dunes.
The sky revealed nothing helpful either. It contained what looked like eight moons, strangely all the same size and color, except one. Seven of them resembled Earth’s moon, except they looked smooth, with no craters to be found. The eighth and largest moon was the most ominous of them all. It was pitch black other than the ring of scarlet around it. It looked like a halo of red hovering in the sky. It cast a sheen of red light that caused the sky to be a very dark crimson, resembling the sand he stood on.
Seth chuckled to himself for a moment.
“Yep, no way I’m awake,” he stated blandly.
“I know damn well I did not just get sent to another world by some patchwork blob of shit.”
As Seth tried to make himself wake up, he noticed a grey round stone the size of a coffee table a couple meters away. It seemed to have what looked like an Avengers lunchbox on top of it. Seth cautiously sifted his way over to the rock and thoroughly inspected the area around it for anything odd, well, odder than an Avengers lunchbox in the middle of an alien landscape.
After becoming as sure as he could there was nothing to worry about, Seth approached the lunchbox and unclasped it before he leapt backward in case it was a bomb or something.
“What am I doing?” he chastised himself, “What would be the point of throwing me all the way out here if that thing was just going to blow me up?”
Trying to shake off the feeling, Seth moved back over to the lunchbox and opened it up. Inside was another green tablet like he saw before, but this time it had small writing on it that didn’t make sense at first. Before his eyes the tablet’s scribbles morphed into the words, “Construct Foundation.” Seth didn’t understand what the hell that was supposed to mean or why the words seemed to change, but for now, he put the tablet off to the side and looked at the rest of the contents.
Next, he found what looked like some sort of onyx crystal, it was about the size of his forefinger, and it had two spikes protruding from each end. There was no special writing on it like the tablet had, it just felt kind of light for its size, like it was hollow. Putting the crystal aside, Seth dove back into the lunchbox and pulled out...
“A pizza Lunchable? Are you fucking serious?” Seth was convinced that whoever put this here was a sick bastard after all.
“I mean of all the Lunchables, of course I get the worst kind created, just my luck.”
He practically threw the pizza Lunchable over to the other items and continued sorting through the lunchbox. Next, he pulled out a eyedropper filled with some clear liquid. He opened it up and sniffed it for a second, but there was no distinct odor. Sighing, he put the stopper next to the Lunchable.
The last item in the lunchbox was a piece of plain notebook paper. It looked like there was writing on both sides, so he went to start reading from the front. Yet again, there was some indecipherable scribbles all over the paper that slowly morphed into English. Seth was too exhausted to even care about the constant letter changing anymore. He began to read the paper aloud to no one in particular,
“Congratulations Subject 50, you have been chosen to help us discover the secrets of an anomaly in Dimension 4297! Rejoice! For your worthless life has finally been given a purpose! You have been given a form of sustenance and hydration your weak body needs to survive for the time being. You have also been given a Foundation Stone and an Anomalous Gem. Place each in your mouth and continue to the other side of the parchment.”
And lower down the page, “If you don’t take the stone and gem in twenty-four hours, you will perish by poison...” Seth paused for a moment, he took a deep breath and calmed himself down as he tried to process the note.
“Dimension 4297? Subject 50?”
To Seth it seemed obvious from the contents of the note and what the monster said back in the white room that he was apparently some sort of lab rat. An experiment meant to understand the origin of creation as the creature liked to put it. Based on the note, Seth could tell he definitely was not one of the first subjects to be pulled into this, nor would he be the last.
The fact that he was apparently in Dimension 4297 meant that this had been going on for probably thousands of years, maybe even millions. Seth’s head started to ache as he tried to process the ramifications of what that entailed.
The real question in Seth’s mind was: “What is an anomalous gem? And more importantly, what is it going to do to me?”
It was basically a no brainer that Seth needed to take whatever the Foundation Stone was. Logically it would be the thing to save him from the acclaimed “poison,” because it seemed as if the Anomalous Gem was an unknown even for the things running this operation. Seth knew that he still couldn’t trust the tablet but the last one he took didn’t seem to have a negative effect on him, so he had a little faith in the Foundation Stone.
At least the name wasn’t a blaring red flag like the “Anomalous Gem.” Not to mention the gem was all black, and spiked, pretty much shouting out, “Eat me and I will give you internal bleeding.” There was so many things Seth was unsure about. He was already mentally exhausted, and the terrain around him seemed to suck away his energy with its promise of desertion. Not to mention he had not slept the night before.
Seth put the items back in the lunchbox and proceeded to lie down next to the round grey stone. He was aware that it was basically impossible for him to tell time in this place due to the lack of the sun and he didn’t see a clock hanging around anywhere.
Even though he knew all this, Seth still waited to fall asleep, aware that he couldn’t have been here for more than an hour already, and he seriously doubted he would sleep for over twenty hours in one nap.
He lied there for a good half hour not realizing why he couldn’t fall asleep. That’s when the contents of the day finally hit him. Seth shivered in place as his body denied to move. Nowhere to go, no idea what to do, and as the monster said, no one to care that he is gone. Tears of frustration and desperation started to build up around his eyes and he clamped them shut to keep them in.
The horrific scene of the old man turning inside out played over and over in his mind. It was something Seth would never forget for the rest of his life. Even if that life ended tomorrow, and there was a high chance it would... Tomorrow. To think Seth’s life went from finally being able to start tomorrow, to it possibly ending instead.
A tear escaped his clenched eyelids as sleep overtook him.
