I was laying on my side on the cold ground and everything hurt like hell.
That was all I could say with any degree of certainty since I couldn’t see for shit in the darkness. This was surprising, given that moments before everything was well lit by the full moon and street lamps. I was pretty sure my eyes were open, could be wrong though. My whole head and back felt like they’d hit something hard. I was more than a little worried I’d received some kind of serious cranial damage.
A quick wiggle test of my various extremities informed me that I probably wasn’t a quadriplegic. That was a slight relief, but things still felt off in a way I couldn’t rightly describe. I tried to roll onto my hands and knees. All the motions felt… off… somehow, and I immediately began to regret taking that action as every joint in my body began to protest in the only way nature allowed: lots of pain. I halted my movements and let them voice their complaints.
When the surge of negative sensory feedback dropped to a bearable level, I tried again to get up. Maintaining any kind of balance proved difficult, so I made the executive decision to blindly stumble around on all fours instead.
At this point, I was able to make a few more assessments. The ground beneath me was cold but didn’t exactly feel like snow or asphalt. I was also pretty sure my backpack had come off in the crash. Everything else still felt pretty fucked up though.
My eyesight was adjusting to the darkness, but I still couldn’t see all that much. I could make out the outline of a large something close by that was maybe the same size as the base of the statue I’d run into, so I directed my stumbling generally towards it.
My head bumped into something solid and even with how slow I was going, the impact still sent waves of pain through my head that made me dizzy. I reached out to brace myself against the edge of it and tried to stand up for a third time. With one hand on the object for support, I was able to pull myself mostly upright. Though my knees shook and had some trouble bearing the weight, I managed to not fall over. Things were going pretty good. Well, at least until I tried to rest my other hand next to my other one.
A surface I was expecting to be solid turned out to be considerably less so. Instead of the stone pedestal I thought I was leaning on, my hand made contact with… something else. It was as though I was sticking my hand into a huge bubble made of mercury. The hand sunk into and slid past the surface with almost no resistance, the area around it rippling and emitting an eerie glow.
Where the ripples spread the surface became translucent. Past the rippling distortion, I saw my hand, the moonlit sky, pavement, trees, and snow. The mall. I was looking at the mall.
Between the pale glow from the distortion around my hand and my eyesight finally adjusting, I could finally make out some details about my surroundings. The most obvious was that I was inside. Surrounding me were stacks of crates and assorted junk. The object I was learning on was the frame of what looked like a large ornamental mirror… if the mirror itself was a rippling silver bubble instead of glass.
The most startling realization, though, was that while the hand illuminated by the moonlight was recognizable as my own, the arm attached to it was not. On this side of the silver membrane, the few parts of myself visible in the dim light had textures and proportions that were wholly unfamiliar.
I yanked back from the surface in surprise, probably more forcefully than required because the sudden movement caused me to lose my balance again and fall over.
I fell to the side and slammed into a tall stack of junk. The pile shook under my weight, rattled back and forth, then pitched to the side. I stumbled back in time to get clear as the pile of junk toppled over in front of the mirror-thing with a massive crash.
I fell back and landed on my hands and knees again, the impact causing another surge of pain. Maybe I should just stop trying to stand up? Yeah, that’s probably a solid plan.
With the glow from the strange mirror-thing blocked by the junk, I was thrust back into darkness. I reached around with one hand, trying to find a pocket with my phone, flashlight, lighter, fucking anything to provide a source of light so I could figure out what the hell was going on.
My hand brushed against my leg where my pocket should have been, and the contact made my whole-body tense up. Instead of the fabric of my pants I was expecting, I found an unfamiliar leg that was coated in a strange fuzz. In return, the leg detected a hand that was far rougher and pointier than anticipated. I froze, standing stock still but for the hand creeping down a leg that was not at all the proportions I was accustomed to and coated the whole way down with the foreign fuzz. Going back up, the hand met a gut and chest that felt just as out of place and ungodly fuzzy as the rest.
My heart was racing, and I was sweating bullets. I was nauseous. What the fuck had happened? Something had gone seriously fucking wrong with that bike crash! I felt like I might vomit and was on the verge of having a panic attack when a muffled voice came from behind me.
”What’s going on in there?”
I turned in the darkness to face the direction of the sound. There was a metallic rattle and then a rectangle of golden light appeared as a door opened across the room from me. Blinding light poured into the room. I squinted hard and shielded my eyes with an arm.
The voice yelled again, “What the— How in bloody Tartarus did you get in here?”
I peered around my raised arm but was only able to make out a vague silhouette standing in the brightened doorway. The glow around the figure’s head brightened, and I cried out as the pain in the back of my head rocketed to unbearable levels. My ears rang, and my vision went black around the edges. I was lightheaded. My limbs crumpled beneath me and I found myself laying on the cool ground once again. The darkness engulfed the rest of my view and I gratefully entered the numbing embrace of unconsciousness.