Chapter Text
Your head hurts.
Throbbing hard enough to trigger vertigo. A sense of balance you would never need, as your chances of getting off the floor were none.
Statistically nil.
Laying in the fetal position is your life now.
But… what was your life before?
Not daring to breathe too deeply, you struggled out of...unconsciousness?
Unconsciousness made sense.
But trying to trace causality back any further resulted in blank.
Zero recollection.
The complete absence of information. Knowledge, you knew you were supposed to know.
Specifically, your entire life up until this point, and that was alarming.
Overall, not a great development.
A crisis, really. One that should be delegated to the nearest healthcare professional…and you do not sense a diploma within yourself. No offence.
You...
You need help.
Cracking an eyelid open did not unlock the secrets of your past. Nor did it reveal your current location. Unless ‘dark, stuffy room’ counts as useful information?
...After several seconds of being unable to triangulate a path to the closest hospital, you decided to search for more clues.
Tensing against the harsh concrete floor revealed its warm, sticky nature.
And you really hoped you were lying in a puddle of alcohol.
Despite it smelling 100% like blood.
Because party-induced amnesia would at least be whimsical, so far as brain damage goes.
...You’re an asshole, aren’t you?
Thirty seconds into living your best life as a wise-cracking amnesiac, and you already want to re-roll.
Eventually, you would have to wake up as someone who wasn’t scared shitless. A competent individual who didn’t tremble through every stage of sitting up.
You might even get to be the guy who doesn’t notice the way your clothes squelched.
With mystery liquid.
Deeply unrecognisable liquid.
Dripping down your spine liquid.
...You can confirm.
You are super in need of medical attention.
But you weren’t willing to call out for it.
That much became obvious when your hand clamped over your mouth. Instinctively stifling any sound associated with your existence.
Even your scattered breathing felt way too loud in the confined space.
Sitting up had given you enough perspective to pinpoint where the darkness transitioned into wall. The low ceiling. The small amount of light that could be seen travelling through these surfaces.
The thought that you were trapped in a small room, covered in blood and experiencing symptoms of head trauma, probably at the behest of a deranged serial killer...
Didn’t even occur to you.
You're really optimistic that way.
You can tell.
Determined to quietly excuse yourself from whatever was going on, you inched forward.
Limbs trembling as you reached out for a light switch. A door handle. Anything, exceptacockroach...
Only to have the wall give under your hand.
Too pliable to be a sound structure. Too textured to be anything but fabric.
This.
Was a dishearteningly bizarre revelation.
Before you could even formulate the question, the answer made itself known to you.
When the wall moved.
Light flooding the enclosed space as the fabric-dome rustled upwards.
Your hand flinched over your eyes. First at the light, second at the unambiguous pool of red that you refused to process.
But no amount of hand could shield you from reality.
Giant fingers, gloved in a darker shade of red, pried the wall upwards. Slowly peeling it away to reveal your hiding place.
Your breath trembled in once, then held as you looked past the hand. Gaze panicking over each giant, blood-soaked detail.
Retaining nothing, as you tried to comprehend the entity dominating the space before you.
Said entity was equally frozen in place, eye sockets wide in a round face. Burning dots of light acted as pupils, shivering into sharper pinpricks the longer you stared.
…You’ve never met a skeleton monster before.
Or anyone ever.
But you feel like you would have expected a giant, if functioning at this scale was your default state.
Instead, every thought in your head flat-lined, as the skeleton spoke in a rasping baritone.
Which isn’t to say there were words.
No, what came out of the giant’s mouth could only be described as repetitive text-to-speech noises.
Incomprehensible.
Though you barely heard it over the sound of your heart thumping in your ears. Light-headed with your still-held breath.
Then the skeleton moved.
Reaching towards you in a slow yet unavoidable stretch.
Your attention got caught between the giant’s piercing gaze and the hand as it inched forward. Crisp lights, far above, casting stark shadows across the skeleton’s rigid features. Revealing nothing of his intentions.
Yet highlighting the splatters of unmistakable red, freckled across the porcelain bone.
Something had to give.
But you weren’t expecting that thing to be the floor. The surface beneath you vanishing between one second and the next. Or at least that’s how it felt, as your tiny body plummeted out of existence in a flash of blue.
You landed hard.
Scrambled up even harder, as the fall unlocked your paralysed limbs.
Choking on a startled breath, you wobbled upright. Taking in your drastically changed surroundings.
If there’s one thing you know about yourself, it’s that you have a keen sense of elevation.
With a single glance at the floor, now a kazillion miles below your new perch, you deduced that YOU HAVE PORTAL POWERS.
And these powers had taken you up into the rafters. Of the warehouse that would have been huge, even if it hadn’t been giant relative to you. The amnesiac who feels like their minuscule stature should not be news to them.
And yet, here you are. Second-guessing the decision to stand, given the narrow nature of the beam you stood upon.
Not narrow for you, so much. But the distance between you and the floor was the final nail in the coffin.
You sat down. Brute forcing your breaths into something sustainable.
Only leaning forward enough to peer over the edge.
Giants scrambled below, shouting at each other in the same incomprehensible code. One individual even going so far as to cough up black liquid.
...You were starting to suspect, that a hospital wouldn’t be enough to fix this.
Optimistically speaking, you were doomed.
Therefore, you did not need another medical emergency.
Did that stop your soul from bursting out of your chest in a flash of blue?
No.
No, it did not.
According to your unreliable sense of trivia, souls are supposed to stay inside the body. Unless pulled into an encounter.
Something that shouldn’t happen to someone who has successfully become one with the shadows.
…You didn’t want to look down and realise that your hiding place had been compromised.
But guess what happened anyway.
The most apparent thing, was that every giant below was a skeleton. Two of the tall variety and three of the small...Multiple variations of the same two skeletons, in fact.
You don’t know how you came to that conclusion.
Or why your worldview included multiverse theory as common knowledge, but lost its shit at giants.
Still, it was nice to have some clue...one singular clue...as you found yourself the target of a dozen eyelights.
Your mouth went dry. Heart rate climbing up your throat as you struggled to decipher the stares.
Intense.
With the desire to consume human flesh.
Or at least that was your placeholder explanation. For the soul-deep dread sinking your stomach.
You may not remember, but your body did.
These people were not your friends.
The tallest skeleton, proportionally much longer than even the next tallest skeleton, was the first to break away.
Bounding up to the wall.
Then... up the wall... vertically...like a giant spider.
...
..
.
...Having existed for two minutes, you were starting to suspect the world might be an unfair place.
There was no way you could outrun him.
You knew that.
But the implications failed to sink in as you struggled to your feet. Backing away while your breath rattled as hard as your hands.
Despite how unsteady you felt on your feet, you withdrew another step. Two, before turning t-
To be intercepted.
The beam beneath you vibrated with the weight of the sudden obstacle. A pair of dress shoes, consuming your field of vision.
And they were nice shoes.
Good quality shoes.
With them being car-sized, you could totally appreciate that.
What you couldn’t handle, was being up close and personal with someone’s ankles.
This is something you discovered about yourself the hard way. Flailing back. Tripping over your feet and buckling downwards.
With the last of your coordination, you managed to scoot backwards as the new skeleton crouched. Bones creaking ominously overhead, as he balanced on the balls of his feet.
Words were spoken. In the same incomprehensible babble as the previous skeleton, right down to the voice. Though the cadence varied. Relaxed, in the failing-to-sound-relaxed way.
Your retreat had frozen. Overwhelmed by the sudden change in fate.
Sure, you’d been exposed to portal powers previously.
But little did you know, your portal powers were not exclusive to you. Nor did they make you special or immune to being utterly screwed over.
Because this skeleton could do everything you could do. Except better and on purpose.
Not only that, he was better dressed.
Though your black pants at least attempted to hide the blood stains, your grey sweater looked ripped straight out of a horror movie.
With the skeleton in a sleek suit and you in Hell, you felt underdressed for your own murder.
But inadequacy was the least of your problems.
Your heart lurched as giant fingers entered your peripheral. Pausing when your attention flinched, only to resume creeping towards you.
With obvious intent.
Yet you couldn’t imagine what would happen if the hand reached you.
Your mind blanked. Causality broken.
Blue flashed.
The hand staggered, then flew backwards as a portal opened beneath the skeleton. Dropping him out of existence before sealing shut.
...You take it all back.
YOU’RE A PORTAL GENI-
Thunder crashed. White swallowing your vision as fingers slammed down.
Bones longer than you were tall cupped the space in front of you. Trapping you between the hand in front, and the skeleton looming behind. Above.
Blanketing you in shadow.
Your eyes pricked. Unblinking and struggling to adjust.
...You had forgotten about the wall-climbing skeleton.
But he hadn’t stopped coming for you.
The fingers in front of you didn’t move beyond their jarring entrance. The skeleton didn’t speak. Seconds passed without either of you progressing the interaction.
Slowly, your head tilted back.
...With the abundance of shadow, it was hard to categorise the expression above you.
But he was crying.
You stared. Ears ringing as you failed to...well, you were just failing in general.
Deeply deeply failing.
Meanwhile, something wrapped around your ankle.
Which made sense.
You were in the process of being murdered.
But glancing down revealed a glitching hand circling the limb.
A you-sized hand, if a little on the obnoxiously long side, and also severed.
Severed hand.
Touching your leg.
...It even had a hole in it.
Numbly, you gave the contaminated limb a tug.
The hand tugged back.
With much more success. Dragging you towards the giant skeleton, only to take a sharp turn.
Straight off the edge of the beam.
For a weightless second, the enormity of the drop lay before you. A blurry expanse of infinite warehouse, lit by blinding lights.
Your fall swung to a jagged halt, as the severed magic hand ignor-
You did not anticipate the alien goop blob.
Attached to the bottom of the beam with zero shits to give about gravity or your personal feelings.
A brush of giant fingers failed to keep you from being dragged directly into said glitchy goopness.
Finding resistance...eventually. As something semi-firm wrapped around you.
You were one with the random black goop event.
And that’s okay.
Or at least happening.
The goop entity dragged you with it, as it skirted past grasping hands.
You were not really participating in this upside-down segment of your life, but you did notice when your abductor ripped a hole in space.
Which is a thing it can do, apparently.
You didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. To the warehouse you spent your formative minutes in, or to the people who taught you everything you knew about dying immediately.
The goop flung both you and itself through the small hole in existence.