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BREACHING CORE > AUTOMATED ACTIONS
POST BREACH DIAGNOSTIC
BREACH SUCCESS > NO DISTURBANCES DETECTED
EVALUATING METHODS > SETTING [OUT] AS NEW DEFAULT DIRECTIONALITY
UNIVERSE DIAGNOSTIC
CLUSTER > DISCONNECTED
SIZE > SMALL
LIFE > LOW
LANDSCAPE > DESERT
POWER LEVEL > 0
FINALIZING ENTRY
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A great crashing boom echoed in Gus’ ears when he suddenly appeared falling midair. Dust billowed over him is staccato waves. As he tried to cough, the dust practically invaded his mouth, bringing with it a extraordinarily intense taste of iron.
He hit the ground just in time to get the full brunt of metal sand crashing back down upon him. Gus sputtered and dug himself back out of the sand. As he looked around, what he saw was not the door out of the hospital wing where he lived, but a vast steel-gray desert. What’s more, there was some sort of violent tear in the sky shining light down onto him instead of the sun.
Was this some sort of terrible dream? Gus checked that he still had his watch and phone on him. He could never remember seeing either his watch or phone in a dream before, always receiving information that they would tell him in that strange dream-like way where you just suddenly know it without realizing anything was even off. Well, he was pretty sure that knowing you’re in a dream kicked you out of it. He pinched himself just in case, but it felt perfectly normal. Damn.
Maybe his power had taken him somewhere other than his home? He’d never heard of someone’s superpower changing before, but he had no other ideas. It seemed a faint hope that he was anywhere that close to home, given the strange desert and the even stranger sun, but superpowers could do some very strange things.
He checked his phone. No service. 7G cell service was supposed to cover the entire world using superpower rebroadcasting, but everyone knew that only really meant places where there were people to pay for it. Probably best to hope he was part of some strange experiment by a hidden super, at least then he could count on someone knowing where he was.
Either way, it made the most sense to pick a random direction and walk in the hopes that he saw something familiar or saw someone who knew where he was. Before setting off, he took inventory of everything he had. One set of clothes, his watch, his phone, a wallet with his driver’s license and some cash, and a half filled liter water bottle. He debated trying to wash out his mouth, but it was probably prudent to hold onto that until he had a better idea of what was going on.
Gus was starting to get really concerned. He could buy that his power has some secret aspect about it that put him in a random desert instead of at home. He could accept that there was in fact, a desert somewhere made of iron dust. He could imagine a superpower that could make the sun look like some sort of rift. His theories were all starting to break down when he realized it was five thirty in the afternoon and the sun was still shining at full brightness.
By this point, the sun should have moved enough that it wasn’t shining at full brightness. Illusion superpowers could do a lot, even shine enough light to make it seem like day when it was night, but sustaining that wasn’t possible. Because he spent so much time trying to figure out his own, Gus knew a lot about superpowers. Illusions--and frankly any kind of superpower at all--had an energy limit. Sometimes that was bodily stamina, sometimes is was all tied up in the power, but not a single document superpower in the history of humanity had ever reached anything close to what was needed to illuminate the night for minutes. It was a difference of several orders of magnitudes.
The only reasonable explanation… well, there wasn’t one that Gus could think of. It was like he had just been plucked from his comfortable home of logic and reason and dumped into a universe with entirely different rules. In other words, nothing made sense.
Panic was settling onto him now. What if he was in a coma? What if there was no rescue? What if somehow this was the hospital, but everything was gone? What if he couldn’t find a way home? What if he died out here? What, what, what?
Gus started running. There was no thought in his mind as to where, only that he needed to get away. The uncomfortably warm dunes loomed over him. The rift-sun mocked his progress with its impossible gaze. Iron dust coated his skin in a gritty layer slowly tearing humanity away from him. Silence boomed all around him, his heavy breaths a lone raft of sanity rapidly sinking into an ocean of madness. Ferrous clumps of iron molded into harsh shapes grasped and beat at his legs and mind as he frantically sprinted and tumbled over sand, a reflection of a senseless world.
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Gus lay on his back in the sand. Eight o’ clock and no change. He needed a plan. Some way to survive.
What did he know? Not much, but even little things might be helpful. The sand was iron, of course. No escaping that. The sun was whatever mad shape it was. There were these strange clumps of metal that almost looked as if they had been welded together by lightning. He’d been seeing more and more of those the further he walked. That could be something, but he didn’t really need a bunch of strangely-shaped metal bits. He’d noticed after taking a moment to sit in silence in the dip between a couple dunes that his skin below all the iron dust was stained slightly black.
Oh! He was almost entirely sure that he’d seen a little something off in the distance while he was running that could have been a plant. That was good. He’d need something to eat if he was stuck out he for longer than a couple days. He’d already drank about half of his water left, but he’d need to find some way to get more of that too.
Shelter was probably a good idea to find as well, but less pressing. It was a nice comfortable temperature, and he didn’t see that changing as long as the rift-sun continued to stay shining right in the middle of the sky. There wasn’t any wind, and no real hint of weather. And probably the most practical consideration, there was literally nothing to shelter in or build a shelter from. The metal bits were way to small, and even if he gathered enough of them in nice enough shapes, the sand would never let him make anything stable.
He sat up and started walking again, with a renewed determination to find something of use.
Gus squatted down in front of one of the strangest looking plants he had ever seen. Not literally the strangest, mushrooms and fungus still took the cake on that, but up there for sure. Bulbous and round, the plant consisted of a hard exterior with a bunch of wrinkles on the top. These wrinkles reached up to one and a half inches tall in some cases and seemed to serve the purpose of leaves. The stark white main body then connected to an impressive network of very thin strands coming out the bottom. They clearly served the same purpose as all roots did, but were formed of a material more similar to bamboo in how inflexible they were, even at their small size. The roots were extremely… furry though. Either way, this was the only plant he had seen thus far, and his stomach was starting to rumble and ache even at the unappealing sight.
He broke off the roots and went to take a bite. Now, Gus had to pleasure of never tasting oil in his life. But if there was one word to describe the interior of the off-brand potato, it would be oil. It was like the entire thing was simply a giant sponge for storing petroleum, with terrible black spongy innards. He immediately spit out the skin of what he would now call an oilplant. He quickly drank and spat out the rest of his water in an effort to clean his mouth. If this liquid was anything like crude oil, it would be an incredibly bad idea to have that inside him.
Gus stared out at the most unique thing he had seen since arriving in this ferrous hellscape. Before him stretched a massive lake of oil. Eventually the sand dunes had tapered off into a shore. The first sign that something was off was the increasing amounts that his hands were being stained black. Yet even with that clue, he could not have expected to see oil just sitting there when he crested a dune.
And somehow, someway, that wasn’t the worst thing he was looking at right now. No, that prize went solely to the impossible wall of lightning that marked the other side of the lake, a little less than a kilometer away. Exactly sky blue, the lightning rained down in silent sheets so close to each other they formed a wall. It was clear, that somehow every bit of sky that he was seeing was in reality an inconceivable wall of lightning holding in the iron desert. It didn’t make sense why the oil didn’t catch on fire, how lightning could even hold something in, or frankly anything about the lightning. At least he now knew where the clump of metal came from.
The farther out in the lake you looked, increasingly tall spires of iron appeared. In similar shapes to humongous chunks of fulgurite, these monuments served as yet another nail in the coffin of sense. The most normal thing in sight was a grey salt deposited in layers on the edge of the lake and the base of the metal towers, yet even that raised more questions than answers.
There was no denying it anymore. Gus Tobin was not on Earth. He’d say not in any spot he’d heard of, but they were past that point now. Frankly, he might as well not even be in the same universe.
As he laid down to sleep, his last thought was if anyone ever came to unlock the door to the ward outside of his house.
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BREACHING CORE > AUTOMATED ACTIONS
DISPLAYING HOST DIAGNOSTIC
POWER LEVEL > 1
DISPLAYING CORE SETTINGS
INTERVAL > 1.602801935E+48
TRANSPORT SELECTION > GUS TOBIN, CLOTHES, HELD ITEMS
BREACH METHOD > CATALOG
DISPLAYING BREACH HISTORY
7586 FAILED BREACH ATTEMPTS > NO VALID TARGETS
1 SUCCESSFUL BREACH
EVALUATING METHODOLOGY > UNCATEGORIZED INFORMATION
RESTRUCTURING STORAGE BANK > DETERMINING HIGHEST CATEGORY > SELECTED {CLUSTER}
PERMORING RETROACTIVE MAINTENANCE > RECATEGORIZING [ORIGIN] > ADDING TO SECTION [POWER-EARTH]
ENSURING CONTINUED INFORMATION CATEGORIZATION > ADDING UPDATE RECORDS TO AUTOMATED ACTIONS
UPDATING RECORDS
STORING MOST RECENT UNIVERSE INFORMATION > ADDING [STEELSAND] TO SECTION [NO-CLUSTER]
ATTEMPTING BREACH
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Gus Tobin’s sleeping form was obscured by a explosion of dust. Minutes later, as the dust settled to the ground, all that was left was a circular indent in the sand.