I sighed for the nth time tonight, and honestly, I'd lost count after fifteen. The fluorescent light above me flickered with that annoying bzzt-bzzt rhythm that made my left eye twitch. Doing the night shift at a 24/7 store isn't just torture—it's a special circle of hell designed specifically for broke college dropouts who thought "I'll figure it out later" was a viable life strategy.
The plastic chair beneath me had molded itself to my ass over the past six hours, and not in a good way. I shifted, trying to find a position that didn't make my tailbone scream in protest. The counter stretched before me like a fortress wall between me and the fluorescent wasteland of energy drinks and overpriced snacks. Behind me, the slushie machine gurgled its demonic symphony, occasionally hiccupping in ways that made me question whether it was plotting my demise.
I should say doing *any* kind of work at night is pure torture, but let's be real—this particular flavor of nocturnal purgatory had its own special seasoning. Everyone with a functioning sleep schedule was tucked into their beds, probably dreaming of things like "potatoes" and "Unicorns," while I sat here counting the minutes until my shift ended and trying not to think about how my bank account looked like a crime scene.
The customers who wandered in at these ungodly hours? Christ. They were like cryptids from some urban legend forum. The kind of people who made you question the trajectory of human evolution. Just last week, I'd served a guy who bought seventeen bags of cat food and insisted on paying in exact change—all pennies. Before that, a woman came in at 3 AM demanding to know if we sold "dream catchers but for nightmares" and got genuinely upset when I explained we were a convenience store, not a spiritual wellness center.
My phone lay face-up on the counter, the screen dimmed but still glowing with the web novel I'd been reading. *Reborn as the Strongest Mage in Another World* or some similarly ridiculous title. The protagonist had just discovered he could cast fireball spells by thinking really hard about being angry. Absolute trash literature, but it beat staring at the wall and contemplating my life choices.
The story was reaching that inevitable point where the main character would accidentally stumble into becoming overpowered through sheer protagonist luck, when—
Clink Clink
The bell above the door chimed its death knell for my peaceful reading time. I didn't even need to look up to know my night was about to get weird. The bell had a particular tone when normal people walked in—confident, purposeful. This one sounded... hesitant? Like whoever just entered wasn't entirely sure they belonged in the realm of mortal convenience stores.
I reluctantly dragged my eyes away from the screen, where the protagonist was apparently about to unlock some ancient magic technique by accidentally sneezing on a crystal. The words blurred as I refocused on the real world, and immediately regretted it.
Standing just inside the doorway was what I could only describe as a fever dream given physical form.
The person—and I use that term loosely—couldn't have been taller than five feet. My first thought was kid, but then I got a proper look at their face. Definitely not a kid. The features were too angular, too knowing. Like someone had taken a middle-aged librarian and fed them through a shrinking ray.
But the face wasn't even the weird part.
The outfit... Jesus Christ, the outfit. Imagine if a unicorn had explosive diarrhea in a paint store, and then someone decided to turn the resulting mess into a fashion statement. Neon pink jacket with electric blue trim, pants that somehow managed to be both plaid *and* tie-dye, and shoes that looked like they'd been bedazzled by a craft store employee having a mental breakdown.
The whole ensemble was so aggressively colorful that I had to blink a few times to make sure I wasn't having some kind of seizure. My retinas felt personally attacked.
Then there were the goggles. Enormous, brass-colored things that belonged in a steampunk convention, not a suburban convenience store at 2:47 AM. They covered half the person's face and reflected the fluorescent lights in ways that made them look like some sort of insect. A very fashionable, very disturbing insect.
In their left hand—and this was the detail that really tied the whole surreal package together—they clutched a brown bottle that definitely looked like beer. Not the cheap stuff either. The label was all fancy script and gold foiling, the kind of craft beer that cost more than I made in two hours.
They stood there for a moment, just inside the doorway, like they were gathering courage for some monumental task. I watched them take a deep breath, square their shoulders, and begin the epic journey from door to counter.
Each step was deliberate, measured. Like they were walking through a minefield, or maybe approaching the final boss in some RPG. The closer they got, the more details I could make out. The jacket had tiny bells sewn into the seams that jingled softly with each movement. The goggles had what looked like LED strips around the edges that pulsed with a faint blue light.
This was it. This was the moment my shift officially entered the Twilight Zone.
They stopped directly in front of me, separated only by the scratched plexiglass barrier and the counter covered in impulse-buy candy. I could see my own reflection in their goggles—tired, confused, and desperately wishing I'd called in sick.
The silence stretched between us like taffy. I waited for them to speak, to explain their presence, to ask for cigarettes or lottery tickets or whatever else brought people to convenience stores in the dead of night. Instead, they just... stared.
Not the normal kind of staring. This was the kind of staring that made you check your shirt for stains, your teeth for food, your entire existence for flaws. Intense, calculating, like they were running some complex algorithm in their head and I was the input data.
My customer service smile—the one I'd perfected through months of dealing with drunk college kids and insomniacs with poor life choices—began to feel strained around the edges. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead. The slushie machine gurgled. Somewhere in the back of the store, the ice machine decided to dump a fresh batch with a sound like an avalanche in miniature.
Still, they stared.
"Hi!" I finally managed, my voice cracking slightly on the single syllable. I cleared my throat and tried again, injecting as much fake enthusiasm as I could muster. "How can I help you, sir?"
The word 'sir' felt weird coming out of my mouth. I wasn't even sure about the gender situation here, but the voice that had taken that deep breath earlier had sounded masculine enough. Sort of. Maybe. Honestly, at this point I was just guessing and hoping for the best.
The staring continued. Behind the goggles, I could sense eyes boring into me, cataloging every detail of my existence. It was like being examined by some alien anthropologist who was trying to understand the habits of nocturnal convenience store employees.
My smile was starting to hurt. The muscles in my cheeks twitched with the effort of maintaining it while my brain ran through increasingly bizarre scenarios. Was this person mentally unstable? Were they casing the joint for a robbery? Did they think I was someone else? Were those goggles recording me for some weird internet video?
Just as I was about to ask if they needed me to call someone—a relative, a caregiver, an exorcist—they nodded.
One single, deliberate nod. Like I'd passed some test I didn't know I was taking.
Then they reached into their jacket.
My heart rate spiked. In the movies, this was the moment when someone produced a gun or a knife or a manifesto written in crayon. My eyes darted to the panic button under the counter, calculating whether I could reach it before—
They pulled out a card.
Just a card. My adrenaline-soaked brain took a moment to process this anticlimactic turn of events. They placed it on the counter between us with the same ceremony someone might use when laying down a royal flush in poker.
"Could you verify this lottery ticket for me, mister?"
The voice was high-pitched, almost childlike, but with an odd formality that made the simple request sound like they were asking me to decode nuclear launch codes. The disconnect between their appearance and their manner of speaking was giving me mental whiplash.
I looked down at the "lottery ticket" and felt my confusion multiply.
It wasn't like any lottery ticket I'd ever seen. Instead of the usual colorful graphics and scratched-off numbers, this thing was sleek black plastic—more like a credit card than anything else. The surface was covered in symbols that definitely weren't from any alphabet I recognized. They looked almost... runic? Geometric patterns that seemed to shift slightly when I wasn't looking directly at them.
"Uh..." I picked up the card, turning it over in my hands. The back was just as black, just as covered in weird symbols. "Is this a new type of lottery?"
The question hung in the air like incense smoke. My customer continued their silent staring routine, offering no explanation, no context, no hint about what the hell was going on.
I'd been working this job for eight months, and I'd seen my share of weird lottery tickets. Scratchers with pictures of cartoon chickens, draw games with numbers that made no sense, those weird instant-win things that required you to match symbols that looked like hieroglyphics. But this? This was in a league of its own.
The plastic felt warm under my fingers, almost like it was generating its own heat. The symbols seemed to pulse with their own internal light, though that could have been the fluorescent overhead playing tricks on my sleep-deprived eyes.
"Right," I muttered, more to myself than to them. "Let's just... get this over with."
I reached for the lottery scanner, a beaten-up machine that lived next to the register and had probably been old when the store first opened. It looked like a relic from the early 2000s, all beige plastic and scratched screens, held together by electrical tape and stubbornness.
The scanner beeped its readiness, and I slid the black card through the slot.
The moment the card made contact with the scanner, everything changed.
The world didn't explode. There was no flash of light, no dramatic music, no ominous rumbling. One second I was standing behind the counter of a dingy convenience store, and the next second there was a blue rectangle floating in the air in front of me.
Not on a screen. Not projected on the wall. Floating. In the air. Like some kind of hologram from a science fiction movie, except I could see it perfectly clearly and it was definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent real.
My brain performed what could only be described as a hard reboot. All higher cognitive functions went offline while some deeper, more primitive part of my mind tried to process what my eyes were showing me. The rational part that understood physics and reality and the general way the universe worked started screaming that this was impossible.
The rest of me just stared.
The blue rectangle hung there like it owned the place, completely unbothered by the laws of physics or my rapidly fragmenting sense of reality. Text began to materialize across its surface in clean, white letters:
**CONGRATULATIONS ARE IN ORDER. YOU WON THE GRAND PRIZE OF THE MULTIVERSAL LOTTERY CONSORTIUM.**
I read the words three times before they penetrated the thick fog of disbelief that had settled over my mind. Multiversal lottery? What in the ever-loving hell was a multiversal lottery?
My eyes darted around the store, looking for hidden cameras, projectors, anything that might explain what was happening. The usual suspects were all there—the security camera in the corner with its blinking red light, the ATM with its permanently out-of-order sign, the display of car air fresheners that hadn't sold a single unit in my entire employment.
No sign of the short person in the rainbow outfit.
They were just... gone. Like they'd evaporated into the recycled air. I spun around, checking the aisles, the bathroom door, the back office. Nothing. The store was as empty as a tomb, filled only with the hum of refrigeration units and the distant buzz of the fluorescent light.
When I turned back to the counter, the blue rectangle was still there, patient as a digital Buddha. New text was forming, each letter appearing with a soft chiming sound that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere:
**YOUR PRIZE IS...**
A dramatic pause. Even interdimensional lottery systems apparently had a sense of theater.
**The limitless System**
**ALERT: DUE TO THE INCOMPATIBILITY OF THE HOST'S BRAIN AND THE PRIZE, THE FORMER WILL BE DECONSTRUCTED AND RECONSTRUCTED FOR OPTIMUM FUSION.**
**ALL MOTOR FUNCTIONS, PAIN RECEPTORS AND CONSCIOUSNESS WILL BE TEMPORARILY SHUT DOWN TO AVOID LASTING DAMAGE TO HOST.**
Each line appeared with mechanical precision, like a computer terminal slowly revealing a program's output. The words hung there, glowing softly in the fluorescent wasteland of the store, and my mind tried desperately to find some framework for understanding what they meant.
Fuse with me? Motor functions? Consciousness shut down?
"Wait, what?!" The words exploded out of me, loud enough to startle myself in the empty store. "What in the sorcerous anomalies is happening right now?!"
My voice echoed off the walls and came back sounding thin and desperate. The blue rectangle continued its patient hovering, unmoved by my outburst. The text didn't change, didn't offer explanations or context menus or a customer service number to call.
"Am I being abducted by aliens?" I asked the empty air, because apparently talking to myself was the only conversation available. "Is this some kind of—"
I never got to finish the thought.
There was no gradual fading, no gentle descent into unconsciousness like in the movies. One moment I was standing behind the counter, frantically trying to process the impossible situation I'd found myself in, and the next moment...
Nothing.
Like someone had reached into my brain and flipped a switch marked 'OFF.' No dreams, no awareness of time passing, no sense of falling or floating or existing in any meaningful way.
Just darkness, complete and total, swallowing me whole.