Photo Prompt - all_unwritten
"It's okay, I can totally handle this," Gary said, nervously confident of those physics classes he took in high school. "If I take a step and fall one way... into the swirling vortex of unbeing... that's where gravity is, right?" So he took a step. And went up according to his ear canal. "Well. That answered nothing except I've miraculously already lost whatever lunch I might have had in my stomach. And possibly could ever have."
One might wonder why he was speaking aloud. In general, Gary was a nervous young man, all bluster and hope and really just could cope with 5th dimensional physics about as well as a sponge could cope with being told it's used to clean the nether regions of humans. That is, they will both have absolutely no clue what is being presented to them.
One might also wonder why Gary is where he finds himself currently. Turns out there's a dimensional rift in the universe that just decided to open up directly inside the door to his favorite bar and then closed as soon as it picked him up. Gary thought he was going in for a cold beer after a long day's work, and instead found the universe wanted a nervous slice of Gary instead.
For a while it was all kaleidoscopic visions of light and color, some with substance that felt not unlike marmalade and some that slammed into him with the force of a 12-megaton neutron bomb. But it appeared that he couldn't die here, only whirl around in the gravity-less space. That was somewhat comforting, until it appeared that time was pretty flexible here as well, and he kept having to go swimming around to find his pants whenever he turned into a toddler again. "This is just fucking irritating." He said to no one in particular after getting his jeans on for the third time, only to turn into 67 year old Gary and nearly burst the button with old man weight.
This was frustrating. All he had wanted were some chips and beer, maybe to watch a game and pretend he was interested for the sake of his masculinity, then go home to his empty apartment and whack off to the free porn he had illegally downloaded... or the Victoria's Secret catalog, whichever arrived first. But no. Here he was in some Euclidian nightmare, with sinuous patterns of visible sound winding around and through him and basically blowing his mind with every passing second. It doesn't take long to rationalize in that sort of situation.
"Maybe I'm hallucinating. Maybe someone shot me with a hallucinogenic dart and right now I'm lying on the floor of Mulholland's with foam in my mouth and my eyes rolled back in my head." He said hopefully, watching the patterns split like atoms and come flying at him at tremendous speed only to feel like snowflakes in a soft breeze.
"Maybe today was only a complicated dream and this is the psycho bit just before you wake up." He said again as he went bouncing like a pinball around light and sound and color unlike anything viewed by humanity.
"Maybe I've just had a stroke and I'm in a coma and this is what a coma is like." He said to no one in particular as he swam to grab his pants again, fighting against a hail of what looked like purple water that felt like mashed potatoes and smelled like apricots.
^ &#*!#@@&* ^ a peculiar blue curl of smoke shrieked near his left ear.
"What? I'm afraid you'll have to translate that for me." He said rather miserably.
^ I said, *welcome*. ^ it intoned again, this time approximating something more like human speech than, say, a snail's sneeze.
"Oh, what? Ah, thank you?" Gary replied, completely confused again.
^ Not at all. Would you like to see the &*#@!$? ^ It curled around him, moving through him and around and behind and in spaces he didn't even have.
"Uh, pardon? The what?"
^ I suppose you don't have a word for it in your language. Safe to say, it's the thing to see. ^
"Really? Well, I do like sightseeing." He said, completely convinced of his own madness now.
^ Excellent. She shall be most pleased. ^ The smoke enveloped him and formed around his body like a glove.
"Hang on, sheeeeeeeeeee?!" Gary screamed as the smoke hurtled him through the rippling arrays and beyond anything he had already seen into...something else.