The second I get the text from Artemis, I stand up off the streetlight I've been leaning against and head inside the planetarium.
It's early evening, so the place is open for business. A bunch of kids are running around and shit, screaming at the top of their lungs, being little menaces to society, and I love them for it. Rock on, children. Stick it to the man.
Some asshole accosts me for smoking indoors, but I flip him off as I pass. Nope, he's a boy scout, and he comes running after me. So, I look him dead in the eyes, take a long drag, then flip the fire alarm. The shit starts screaming and flashing and the kids go nuts and everybody hurries toward the doors to evacuate the building.
He's still standing there gaping at me.
"I don't smoke around kids, asshole. Get the fuck outta here."
Then he gets to stepping. Smart.
I'm trudging upstream as more people escape from deeper within the building. Some old lady gets knocked over so I very gently punch the guy who did it and help her up. Ah, shit, next it's a kid crying 'cause she can't find her mom, so I take care of that too. Then I kick a handful of preteens out who were intentionally staying inside because they thought it was funny.
Regulars. Gotta love the general human public.
Finally, the place is empty. I don't intend to blow it up or anything, but I'd rather not risk a bunch of civilians getting decimated. Better safe than sorry. Killing people is one thing, but accidentallykilling people? That shit is haunting.
I pull on my fingerless blue kickboxing gloves, roll my shoulders and neck around, then kick open the double doors into the actual planetarium's dome. Just as I'm about to walk in, I catch the sense that something isn't right. It's a gut feeling, and I can't pin down why, but I know better than to ignore it.
The auditorium thing is in the middle of running its automated presentation. The stars are soaring around on the ceiling, illuminating constellations and planets and whatever else, all while an early 2000s documentary style robotic male voice talks and talks and talks. I don't see anything out of sorts. I don't hear anything unusual. I don't smell anything that could be off.
I step back, checking around the doors and looking closer at them. Just around the time I start questioning my drunken sanity, because I am pretty damn hammered off that vodka, I take notice of a little hexagon in the lower right hand corner. It's drawn in black and is specifically located on the metal hinge. A few smaller markings surround it, with a distinct symbol right in the middle.
"Chinese," I mutter to myself under the sound of the fire alarms. "A rift ward. These doors connect to multiple different locations. But… Hm. Anna would use different symbology. Not Greek. Too obvious. Slavic or Norse, most likely. Not Chinese…"
Someone or something else has been here.
I'm not the first person to find Anna's prison.
"So much for the secrecy," I sigh, scratching my head and puffing my smoke while I squint through my drunk goggles at the stupid ward glyph. "If Anna didn't do this… Then it's a diversion, I'd bet. Another security measure."
There are three things in life that I do not fuck around with. The Divines, hauntings, and dimensional magic. My drunk ass is not about to find out. Absolutely not. I back the hell up and consider another approach.
"Shiiit…"
I'm well aware of the sirens approaching the building. Probably fire and EMS. Hopefully not the POS. Damn, I gotta hurry but I don't know shit about this. I just hit up Artemis a minute ago so I'm iffy about calling another Divine. I gotta phone a friend.
Ring, ring, ring, ring. Banana phone.
"Oh, hey! I thought you'd be one of those 'wait a week before texting' kinda girls. What's up? Jesus, is that a fire alarm?"
"Yep! Sorry, I'm in a hurry! Save me, Aife! I need a friend!"
"No way! That's crazy! I'm your friend! Whatcha need, honey? Fair warning, I'm fucking rocked off that anthusae weed again, but let's hear it."
"Love that for you! Do you know any fae?"
"Oh, do I. They're fucking everywhere out here. Why?"
"I'm looking at a rift ward glyph and I dunno what it does or where it goes!"
"Oh, Gods. Eastern or western?"
"Eastern!"
"Send me a pic. I might know it."
Fuck, I'm running out of time, but I do it.
"Oh, yep, yep. That's a reversal ward. Walk through it backwards. It'll take you to a… few different places. Any other doors you find, you have to pass through them backwards as well."
"Thank you, thank you, thank you! What–What happens if I don't?"
"Um. Let's not find out!"
"Yeah! Good point!"
The cops arrive. "Police! Freeze! Put your hands up!"
"Wha–Well, which is it, man? Can't do bo–"
They start shooting at me. As cops do.
No problem solving skills. Just straight to bullets.
"Thanks, Aife!" I shout into my phone at the top of my lungs. "I gotta go! Love you!"
Nope, can't hear her. I hang up and hurry backwards through the double doors. On the far side, I watch the doors slam in the middle of a plain white wall. The second they close, the sound of gunshots go silent.
I'm officially in a different plane of reality. Fun, fun, fun.
Yeah, I'm in a hallway. Almost looks like a hospital, I think, lined with a dozen other doorways on either side that go nowhere. There's nothing but gaping black voids on the other sides of the frames.
"Damn. That's kinda freaky."
I don't have any signal in here on my phone.
Don't need bars to snap a few pics to post later.
Wait, actually? I'll set them to auto post in twelve hours.
@strmgrl: next room machine broke 🧍♂️
"Mmm… Hecate follows me. I gotta do better."
@strmgrl: damn this place rly fell off :/
"Pfft. That's more like it. Yeah, that'll do it. 'Cause, like, the rooms aren't here. It's like they… fell. Off. The hallway. And stuff. Shit, I'm drunk…"
I wander down the hallway, checking both sides just to see if anything changes. It does not. Doorway, empty black void. Doorway, empty black void. Doorway, empty void. Nope, nothing different. I can't see the end of the hallway either. Maybe a hundred yards that-a-way it just goes dark. I stop in place and look back the way I came.
"Oh. Shit. That's different."
Both ways are the exact same.
Hallways, spooky doors, fade to black.
I scratch my head. Then I light another smoke.
"So, I guess…" I point my cigarette left. "There's… probably no end to it." I point my cigarette right. "Probably no way back… either."
Smoke goes in. Smoke goes out.
"Man, I hate dimensional shit. What the hell am I supposed to do?"
My phone is still in my hand. I unlock it and it opens to my call list. The most recent call? Aw. That's my friend. My newest friend. I don't have any friends but now I do. Oh Gods, I have two of them! Aife and Kahri!
"Ohhh, I love them! I love them so muuuch! Friends! I have friends again! Yayyy! Um. What was I doing? Shit, I forgot. Wait… Oh, Gods, I'm too drunk to do this fucking… This thing. Am I my own worst enemy? Pfffft! Whaaat? Why would I even think that shit, man? I'm my own best friend!"
I am not my best friend. Anna is my best friend.
"Oh, fuck! Anna!" I gasp, looking around. "Well, Jesus Christ, how do I get to her? What is this pla–What is this shit, man? Doors? Why are there so many doors? This is–Like, this is an informative–This is an importative… In-door-dinate amount of doors! Why are there so many–Oh."
Aife. Doors. Reversal ward.
"Easy W," I laugh, walking backwards into the void.
And I fucking fall straight into the infinite empty.
"Whoa." My voice echoes. Feels like I'm floating. "This is… This is weirrrddd…"
Weightless. I'm weightless. It's not a good combination with this alcohol poisoning of mine. Shit, I might puke here. I can't tell which way is up or down. Left or right. There's nothing to go off of. Doesn't matter if my eyes are open or closed. Yeah, I might puke. I really do not wanna pu–
And then I'm underwater.
Sort of?
I'm at the bottom of a coral reef but I'm not suffocating or cold or wet or anything. Floating, yes, just like I'm in sea, but that's the only sensation that's even remotely similar. Thank the Gods for that, because my phone and my drugs and all my documents in my backpack would be fucked.
I flip myself over and hang upside down, tightening my backpack so it doesn't float away. "Well, we're in a bit of a pickle now, aren't we, old boy? Not a door in sight! Aw, I miss Kahri…"
Thanks to big dawg Uncle P, I've been swimming since before I could walk, or something like that. I dunno. At some point, I acquired consciousness, and I already kinda knew how to swim. So this is nary a–nary even a mere speck of relish, it's so little of a pickle. Oh, I have to tell Kahri that one.
"Can't remember the last time I went swimming." I pull myself along the coral, blown away by the sheer vividness of their colors. "This is… so nuts. Wait, can I…"
Yes. Yes I can.
I take a few pics for the vine.
@strmgrl: forbidden rock candy 🗿 hungryyy
"Yum."
I do actually try a bite.
"Ow. That hurt. Like biting a rock. Just like… Rock candy! I just got that! Holy shit, that's why they call it rock candy? Y'know, that just means enough people felt the craving to chew on rocks that they decided to make it possible through candy. New rocks just dropped. Have a bite. Sike! That's candy, bro! Shout out Kahri and Aife! My friennnds!"
And post video.
The coral reef was a bit of a pickle in itself. Because doorways had become my priority, that was what I was looking for. However, that said, irregardless, there seemed to be nary a doorway in sight! Perplexed and puzzled by this recent discovery, I set my mind to it, old boy, and I got to work at getting to the bottom of this conundrum. Yes, I daresay 'twas nothing short of a mystery.
Oh, no. I'd begun thinking about things in the past tense, Nicole realized, and though 'tis quite unfortunate to infringe upon your immersion, my second person friend–That is, the royal you, to be specific–the fact is, our strapping and intrepid hero's voyage across dimensional space had placed her in a bit of a gray zone in terms of being present within a rational existence that was possible to be explained, or capable of its description and analysis being transmitted to you through her own perspective. However, as the third person omniscient narrator of this riveting action adventure story, I can tell you with utter confidence that she would indeed regain her sense of awareness to the present tense momentarily, and thus I shall cease to exist.
You see, this odd and bizarre coral reef was, by all accounts, submerged not by seawater but by a limitless ocean of pure possibility. In this place, Nicole had become polydimensional, and though she was fully aware of the fact, there was nary a thing she could do about it. After all, in the fifth dimension, and ostensibly all dimensions beyond it, what good is a spark of lightning if 'tis constrained merely to a four dimensional existence? 'Tould be equivalent to throwing a dart at a dartboard, except the dartboard is the concept of time itself.
Not exactly sensible, now is it?
Nor feasible, for that matter.
So, there Nicole was, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, with no idea where to go nor how to get there, and to put it quite lightly, she was more or less totally fucked. In a reality of infinite possibilities, one truly governed by abject and utter chaos such as this, the issue with searching for a doorway was that in this place, there were an infinite number of realities in which the very concept of doorways does not exist in the first place. Likewise, however, the inverse was true, and yet in her drunken stupor, Nicole was unable to grasp the fact that in this place of, yes, infinite possibilities, it was entirely possible for anything to be a doorway. A rock, for example. A very colorful, very crunchy, very tempting rock, one which simply begs all who take notice of it to go ahead and have a bite.
Combined with the stipulation that she needed pass through said abstracted, intangible, and highly metaphorical doorway in reverse, Nicole was indeed, as her good friend Kahri might say, in quite a pickle indeed. In a totally unrelated tangential narrative direction, I do indeed endeavor to say that right at this very moment, Kahri was safely at home, humming a warm and joyous tune to herself as she meditatively harvested a good ninety grams of psilocybe cubensis mushrooms from the rack of growth mediums in plastic totes arranged on a tall shelf in her closet. Ninety grams of wet mass, of course, and in need of a lengthy stint in the dehydrator, at which point the total mass would level out at about nine grams, give or take. More than enough to share a hefty dose the next time she hung out with her newest friend, whom Kahri was already quite fond of.
In any case, I tell you right now, my second person friend, that all Nicole needed to do in order to escape this conundrum was to stop swimming forward and start swimming backward. Not the underwater breaststroke, but the underwater squidstroke. If you don't know what I mean by that, I feel sorry for you.
All of this said, one must never underestimate the sheer unadulterated power of a heavily intoxicated stone top lesbian. Her sexuality, of course, had no bearing on things in terms of immediate relevance, but there I said it for comedic effect. You see, Nicole being drunk and disorderly had led to the direct causation of a turn in the tides, as the alcoholic catalyzation of her sense of unbridled whimsy led her to turn over and admire the sight of the sunlight filtering through the water's surface up above.
How nice, she thought, to witness such a view.
And then it was immediately over.
Goodbye forever, old boy.
"Holy shit," I, Nicole Artemis Astoria, blurt out, patting myself down to check that I'm intact and in one piece. "Jesus, man. That shit was nuts. Was that a magically induced ego death or what? Fuck, this is why I hate dimensional shit!"
After briefly pausing for a cigarette and vodka break–I forgot I drank all the vodka–I check out my surroundings and find myself once again in a dark forest. Sorta. I think it looks kinda manicured and landscaped, less a patch of wilderness and more of a well maintained garden. The vegetation is dense, but there's a stone pathway that winds through the trees up ahead, and other than a tasteful amount of dead leaves littering the ground, nothing has overgrown onto the path. It smells fresh, damp, and earthy, like algae and wet moss, and there's a strong fragrance of some kind of flowers wafting through the gentle breeze.
"Damn. This shit is beautiful."
I start walking, smoking as I go. The path continues on for a while, twisting and turning and meandering, but there's only the one way forward. Not one intersection. But the farther I go, the more things start to change. It starts with a few stone lanterns, like the cool ones out in the East, glowing soft amber with a few candles burning within. Then I come across a pool of glassy waters, crystal clear but difficult to see through because of the darkness, even with the paper lanterns floating around on its surface. I can just make out a few pretty koi fish swimming around in there between the lily pads and the lotus flowers.
"I'm beginning to suspect the Shinto Pantheon… But that wouldn't make any sense, would it?" I scratch my head and puff a few clouds as I continue walking. "Ameterasu's kid is locked up too, so why would the Shinto be involved with imprisoning Anna? Unless they're making a move on us Greeks. In which case…"
No, it's better practice to avoid suspecting the Divines unless there's concrete proof. I'm not trying to get yeeted into the solar corona because I pissed off a Sun Goddess by accusing her of something she didn't do. Instead, I just keep going, searching for anything even remotely resembling a doorway as I make my way down the path.
After the next bend, the gardens open up wide. The massive crescent moon slices a white arc through the night sky, illuminating a legit eastern style garden, with more ponds and shrubs and low hanging flowering trees, more of those stone lanterns all around, and even a rock garden off to my left with some seriously elaborate patterns raked into the sand. A towering pagoda rises from a sprawling structure at the heart of it all, and ember lights glow through nearly every window, as well as the rice paper walls of the lower building.
"Damn, bro! This shit's gorgeous!"
I take a few pics for the vine.
No caption this time. It's too pretty.
Well, there are plenty of doorways in the building, so I cross a winding bridge with a roof over it across a huge koi pond, halfway expecting some giant fish to jump out and attack me for, like, a mid-boss fight or something. But, nothing bothers me. I'm starting to wonder if whoever set this up really gave a shit about making it secure. Not one monster or bad guy or henchman has crossed my path or tried to stop me.
"Guess if they knew I was coming…" I carefully step up onto the roundabout porch sorta thing and approach one of the rice paper sliding doors. "They'd know I'll just punch through anything they throw at me. Unless I just haven't reached the real dungeon yet. Maybe this is it."
I slide the door open and peer inside. Yep, tatami mats and decorative swords and big sweeping paintings and shit. Looks pretty normal to me, so far. With a shrug, I snub my cigarette because this place is classy as hell and I respect that, then I turn around and walk through the doorway backwards.
Nothing of note happens. I'm just… facing the gardens.
Glancing around, I hum in thought as I wander inside and start searching. "Changing things up on me, huh? A'ight, a'ight. Not a magic doorway this time. Guess I gotta find the real one. I'd bet it's at the top of that tower. Oh, this is perfect. Peak dungeon environment. I'm gonna have to fight increasingly stronger bad guys on every floor, but then when I defeat them they'll be like, you fought with honor and stuff, and then we'll bow in mutual respect, and then they'll let me pass. Then I'll get to the top and there'll be, like, a dragon or something and then the boss music will start going off, and then we're gonna duke it out at full power! It's gonna be so badass!"
The first floor of the tower is empty.
"Oh. Okay. Probably to give me a spot to prepare myself."
The second floor of the tower is empty.
"Uh. Intro sequence. Yeah. Here I am, bastards! Fight me!"
The third floor of the tower is empty.
"Just what the hell is going on here, old boy?"
The fourth floor of the tower is empty.
"Am I in the wrong place or something? What is this?"
The fifth floor of the tower is empty.
"Am I supposed to walk backwards up the stairs, maybe?"
The sixth floor of the tower is empty.
"Uh. Yo, can I get a hint or something? Hello? Anyone?"
The seventh floor of the tower is empty.
"I'm confused. And scared. Why is this happening?"
The eighth floor of the tower is empty.
"Oh, I think I get it. The real challenge was: stairs."
The ninth floor of the tower is e–
No it isn't! There's a little shrine up here on the far side.
I timidly enter the room backwards to no avail, then cautiously make my way across the tatami mats over to the shrine. A few banners are strung across above it, red fabric with black Chinese characters painted on them. There's a table in the middle, like an altar maybe, with a few odd wooden boxes on it. A pair of those neat round drums are on stands just to the left and right, there's even a whole ass gong, and thousands of little white candles are burning all over the place. As I get closer, their flames begin to dance more erratically.
"Hm." I inspect one of the boxes. "Prayer box? Something like that? Really don't know enough about eastern pantheons… Ignorance is my enemy here today. Since there doesn't seem to be any other enemies around."
"Your ignorance," my own voice repeats back to me from behind.
I whirl around to find myself entering the room. Same royal blue designer hoodie, same high quality fancy black leggings, same dope ass motherfucking sneakers, same chin length brown hair, same stupid smirk on our faces. She even has my backpack and my gloves on.
"Oh, fuck," I say, retreating a step. "So that's what Hecate meant…"
I might have to fight a copy of myself.