Though I Walk...

[Doomguy]

Going through a dimensional portal has never been a pleasant experience, as I’ve mentioned several times already. It’s about the sudden change. It’s what I expected when I went through the island gate. What I found wasn’t some pearly gate or trans-dimensional rainbow road into the stars. I might not have even been surprised if I just saw a giant image of Omni’s smiling face, like the most egotistical front door you could have. I prepared myself for whatever I might cross paths with in this other land, whatever demons or angels foolhardy to come at me would get a big serving of buckshot.

What I found was nothing.

Not necessarily an absence of anything. But a complete vastness of emptiness stretched out before me. No wind to blow across the seemingly infinite blackness ahead of me. No sound but the echo of my two steps into the void. For a brief moment I had wondered I had died and this was where bad primes went when Omni no longer found them entertaining. I stared out there, stunned and in awe.

I was like this until I finally remembered to breath.

I recovered from the daze and moved slowly forward, tracing my eyes across almost the featureless universe. It was not completely empty, despite what first impressions offered. Basic shapes blended into the horizon, stairs that seem to go into nowhere and catwalks into the abyss.

I let out a frustrated groan that slowly turned into a rage filled scream as a lot of pent up emotion and sudden realization came in at once. A maze. Another fucking maze. How much of my life was going to be stuck in mazes and labyrinths? At least this one wasn’t trying to actively kill me, but that shouldn’t be the bar of entry!

What was I even looking for? Another gate? I squinted out to the horizon and I wasn’t getting anything outside of the light behind me. Likely obscured. Maybe in a room. Could be fucking under me for all I could tell. I decided that grumbling was not going to change anything and stumbled across the platform with my shotgun as an impromptu cane.

Last thing I needed was to end this whole quest with an anti-climatic stumble off the edge of a platform and crack my skull open...

Then everything lit up.

A pulse went across the void, originating from seemingly everywhere before the multi colored lights sped off in hidden lines in the ground. Like wires in a motherboard, the connections were an intricate matrix that spanned across the entire dimensions. Bright white traveled in clustered to some far off destination, for a purpose that was beyond me. The sudden light framed the world around me and revealed the labyrinth for the briefest of moments. It was seeming unnatural, illogical, and yet not without a twisted logic to it. Not unlike a M.C. Escher painting. Beyond, just within sight, was massive, long limbed yet seemingly faceless beasts that walked on four hoofed legs. They grazed with no reaction to the suddenly light show nor such an insignificant creature as myself, and they disappeared into the darkness once the pulse of light ended.

I was left alone with a serious case of existential crisis.

There was a serious need to get out of there. Forget just getting to Omni, I thought sticking in here for any longer than needed was going to seriously affect my health. There had to be a pattern. Omni didn’t exactly come off as someone who planned, or took things seriously. If his goal was entertainment, then this dimension must keep to that. Either it was not built for people, and this was meant for a purely practical use, or it was meant to be solved to get to him. Either way, there was a way there.

Or he just liked light shows and I was fucked. But hey, I’m an optimist

“Maybe I should have tried finding ruby slipper first” I joked as I walked down a long walkway. The light from the gate started to fade and disappeared, leaving the only light the dull glow of the lines that had flashed so brilliantly earlier. I kept on the straight and narrow as far as it would take me, and I was dumped into a platform with two more path that branched out from it.

Neither looked like a good choice. I turned around to see how far I had moved, perhaps I missed something on the way.

And I somehow slammed my face in a wall that was not there a second ago.

Curses and yells flew into the twilight. I slammed the bottom of my boot into the offending wall, and when that inevitably failed to do anything I waved my fists into the air and raved to the sky.

“Oh, so it’s a MOVING MAZE? Fine! That’s how we’re gonna play it, you fucking cocksuckers!?” This went on for a while before i turned back to my two choices. I was fuming, but as long as there was some progress then I would get over it.

Except both paths seem to disappear as they suddenly stopped like diving boards over what counted as the ground in this place. I was stuck, and the only apparent escape was jumping into the wild blue yonder and trying my luck again after I respawned at the Nexus.

It should change again, I immediately corrected myself. If it happened once, so it should again. That was the hope, but I knew I had to consider what my other option was. I still had my jet pack, I could attempt to make it to some other nearby platform. Hell, I haven’t checked if I could summon still, for all knew a ladder could get me over the wall behind me. But with time to think I considered what happened if luck ran out on me and I was really stuck.

My eyes ran across the leylines. Two of them were laid parallel to each other, going down one path, around the edge of the platform and then down other other path. If this was one giant circuit board, the lines would continue on the flip side. I got on my belly and looked underneath to see this was the case. When I reached out, I wanted to see if I could feel a punch through the material if there was some sort of divide.

What I felt was gravity pull my arm down. Either these platforms had their own pull, or all the rules I knew were big jokes.

I was a child running around in an eldritch playhouse. I didn’t know the rules, and the world around me twisted and bend in impossible ways.

But I could figure it out. I had a chance, and that’s all I needed. A lot has trained me for this, and a maze would be a fitting, if annoying, end to return home to.

[Doomguy]

“So if I head up to that way, and it changes, that should allow me to… no, that’s not right” I glowered at the “map” printed across my visor, trying to solve the various pieces in front of me with all the mental capacity a high school degree could provide. It had been a grueling slog since I entered the Void, rules I knew in reality were merely a passing joke here, and the technology that would have saved my ass from being lost even in the warped hellhole of Capital Dis was being pushed to its limit as well as mine. I’ve to unlearned a lot about, well, everything, and here I was standing around second guessing myself like a tool.

“Fuck it” I finally decided, and bursted across the catwalk. It seemed indistinguishable from the others I had crossed to get to this point, but I wasn’t exactly pressed on time and if this WAS the wrong way, I’d just cross it off the list.

The very, very long lists with a lot of crosses on it.

“Come on” I demanded to whatever fate or luck overlooking this place. Once I was centered in the middle of what I assumed was the center of the area, a long trapezoid (there’s a word I never thought I’d use when I graduated high school), with 6 paths connected to it including the one I entered through. I can’t even remember I was there just squeezing my eyes tight, chanting those two words over and over until something happened.

There was no whoosh of wind, no feel of dimensional travel, not a single change. I just closed my eyes and hoped for the best.

When I opened them, I did see a change. Rather than the previous shape, it was now shaped like a diamond. This was not at all like I had assumed, the platform had been cut in half when I though the divide was at the pathways. I zipped through the different map parts filled though my automapper’s cache and realized this fragmented the parts even smaller and increased the combinations to an almost infinite amount more, when the combinations were already a number higher than I could count..

And I haven’t gotten any closer to any gate, let alone to Omni.

Bubbling rage that I had held back as the frustration of walking alone in this miserable void had turned to boil, and without anyone to vent it on I ripped my helmet from my own head and spiked it into the white and unyielding surface, a piercing crack reverberated into the nothingness.

“FUCK, SHIT, DAMN, COCKSUCKER-” I cursed, I raged, I let out every bad word I knew even if there was no one here to be offended by it. Even getting this outraged was adding to the frustration. How many times had I gotten angry like this since I entered? Every little setback pissed me off more than it should have, this place had ground me down to my wit’s end and my temperament has only got worse.

“RIPPING YOUR FUCKING ARMS OFF, PIECE OF ASS, MOTHER RARGHING, BRAH, DORRGEN, AAAAGH!” As insults and swears turned into gibberish and primal yelling, I kicked the nearest object and sent it flying towards the edge.

And my heart nosed dived into the pit of my stomach and my eyes grew the size of dinner plates as I realized what I sent spinning across the "sky" was my helmet.

I kinda needed that.

I raced after it, a vague hope that the arc of the kick meant I could catch it on the way down before I lost all my progress and the thing that’s saved my ass (er, head) far too many times to count. I reached out, my hand outstretched so far it felt like my arm was going to pop out of its socket, and I leapt into the air with jet pack primed.

Not that there was a point to it, as the flying object suddenly stopped in mid fight before it was even in reach, and I’m sure the look of dumbfoundedness, along with the following crash back to terraferma, would have been funny had there been anyone here to watch. Instead I quietly got up and dusted myself in the lonely landscape of the void.

“Of course. Why was I expecting anything else?” I asked aloud as I examined the IFH (identified flying helmet) hovering out of reach, lazily spinning without any consideration for physics or my feelings. It was slightly degrading to have used my shotgun as a stick to grab the thing, but at least I retrieved it with minimal fuss “Sometimes I really got to assume the stupidest thing is going to happen, and when it doesn’t I’ll be less disappointed.”

“And I’m still just talking to myself, aren’t I?” I looked around, seeing that was the case, shook my head, and slipped my helmet back on. “People are going to think I’m crazy”

“Not that I’m crazy” I reassured myself.

Once the helmet was placed back on where it was supposed to be, I flipped through the HUD to see what damage I did from my field goal kick. Sure, it’s survived being dunked in lava, hammer blows from demons twice my size, bullets, rockets, and hellfire, but the dumbest shit has a tendency to knock out equipment.

What I found was a lot better than three points. It seemed in its maiden voyage it collected a LOT of data on the shape of the maze, and I was already dividing the parts into their smaller components. If this was like one giant jigsaw puzzle, then at the least I’ve found more of the pieces. In this expanse, that could mean less than a percent of all the pieces, but it was still more that I had before. And if there was one thing that I felt missing, it was progress.

“I guess I should abuse my equipment more often” I joked before I started down the next path.

[Doomguy]

How long was I dealing with the dimension between worlds before I found my way out? I have no idea, and I have no intention of knowing. Time was basically meaningless in that modern art exhibit and after a while I had stopped checking my HUD’s clock because I’d grown sick of seeing the increasingly large number I saw in the corner of my eye every time I tried to parse out the next set of map pieces I gained. I was used to trial and error exploration of unnerving ruins and fortresses, demonic or otherwise, but even the Unholy Cathedral or the Gate to Limbo was not this twisted. At least there I could have shot something.

I hadn’t seen any gate since the one I came through, although in theory I knew which parts connected to it. Of course, that was the main problem: assuming anything made sense here, but I wasn’t just going to wander aimlessly and hope luck would save my bacon. It never worked before, and it wasn’t going to now.

“Maybe I’ll start hallucinating and that’ll show me how to get out” I joked, then flinched as I realized I was talking to myself again. But as demoralizing as it was, it was better company than the unfeeling things that passed by like ships in the night. Their only contributions to my time here was a creeping paranoia every time I saw one, worried that one might pass by me and gobble me up as a snack in my sleep.

It was only a greater paranoia of what they could do if provoked that has kept me from shooting them out of a desperate need of distraction. And that was a line I was close to crossing.

I looked up to the “sky”, let out a big roar of wasted violence, and then took a deep breath once my throat started to hurt.

And out of the corner of my eye, as I let out the biggest sigh I could muster, I saw something else. A winged, humanoid mockery of an angel, white as a certain godlike tumor I met when I was first dragged into this bad fan fiction and with the same bald headed look. It just floated through the air minding to whatever task was, but it was close enough that I finally found a good target.

The insults basically came rolling out on their own accord.

“HEY! You flying shitbag! You fucking rat with wings!” I yelled out to the thing, it’s path undeterred or attention taken as I piled on foul language “Yeah I’m talking to you, pusscake! Is your cum stain boss sending you out to suck dick or are you doing that on your own accord!?” I walked to pace with the celestial-esque thing, walking as close as the catwalks and platforms would allow and maybe even going over a few obstacles I didn’t think I could in my single minded attempt to insult it.

“Trying to ignore me, cunt?” I asked, although ti was clear it wasn’t trying to ignore me, it was completely succeeding. I might as well had not been there, which might have pissed me off if I wasn’t already enraged by the pre-existing terribleness of the void. There wasn’t even an errant rock to throw at my abused target, the bare nothingness was getting to me even on small levels.

Like a pyramid scheme of annoyance.

“We’ll I’m fucking here now and you can’t ignore me forever. I will find the way to Omni and I WILL shove the BFG down his throat. I’ll reduce his his smiling cranium to a smear on the wall of the multiverse. I’ll dance on his corpse and make a portal home out of his bones. I’ll turn his fucking world inside out for fucking messing with me!” My screams disappeared into the darkness, boiling blood in my veins coming to a simmer as my threats became less and less potent and by the end I was just slinging slurs and swears not suitable for publication.

I was no where closer to where I wanted to be, my voice was hoarse, and the thing went off on it’s merry way as if it wasn’t accosted by a foul mouthed marine in dayglow green armor.

But I felt much better.

“Alright. Now, where the fuck am I?” I glanced around the area I was in. I would say I was lost and trapped in a place without any rhyme or reason, but if you’ve stayed this far you’d know that was the case since I popped out of that damn fountain. I scanned the horizon, looking for find where I started my brain emptying rant.

And then I saw the look of a black arch against one of the blank white platforms, almost phasing in with the dull dusk background and absorbing what little ambient light there was. I blinked, my fatigue burdened mind wondering just what the hell that thing was, before it struck me like a mallet to a church bell. I was absently staring at the thing I was looking for one moment and in the next I was blitzing right for it in excitement and utter disbelief.

“Don’t disappear, don’t disappear, don’t disappear!” I yelled at it, the second time I was yelling at a mindless object and the first I knew it was pointless to do so. I jolted over basic shapes and lines, a sudden flash of colorful lights dancing across the grand circuitry and illuminating the gate with in rave’s worth of effects.

My sight was kept on it as I drew closer, almost not noticing the sudden right angle change to my path. It didn’t phase me, as I threw my leg up and the other and realigned to the new gravity. The path seemed to twist and turn as pulses shot pass me, and when I reached the goal I found the gate had suddenly disappeared. I scratched my helmet in confusion, before I realized what happened and I walked over the edge to find it on the other side.

I looked at the gate, identical in every way to every other gate I’ve seen and walked through. No identifiers, earthy tones like a granite top decorated it’s surface. I did not know if this was the second to last door to my escape, or the chute back to square one. Jumping in would be based on pure luck.

I looked back through all the pieces. There needed to be something to be gleamed here and not just a flip of the coin. I looked over the connections around me, the pulse revealing how this thing connected to other things. But looking at this platform and the one I came in on, they were completely unlike anything else. Only other unique piece could fit with it.

Like themselves.

I was running around in this rat’s maze for so long, I hadn’t considered an other option. I sat on my butt, crossed my legs, closed my eyes, and waited.

I wasn’t sure how much time it took, but when I next open my eyes I was at the center. Maybe not the literal center, but it was hard to describe it as anything else. Arranged like petals of a flower, interconnected platforms each with a gate on it around a single platform with an ever changing fountain, with a second set of gates like the ones I entered through in a layer beyond that.

And just out of reach, standing above it all, was a circle. Wholly unique and untouchable which held my way out.

“...how are you suppose to get up their normally?” I asked aloud as I jet packed up. Considering how loose the rules where, I realized how malleable the Omniverse was and I could have simple flown up here by will alone.

I chuckled at that though, and started the end of a very long journey.