Consciousness was a cold, unwelcome intruder.
It began not with a thought, but with a sensation—the brutal chill of concrete seeping into bare skin. Then came the sound. A solitary, metronomic drip. Plip… plip… plip… Each drop was a punctuation mark in a sentence of silence, echoing through the vast dark.
Roderick Samuel Arthur's mind, still clutching at the fading warmth of sleep, fought to surface. His last memory was the soft glow of his laptop screen in his rented apartment—the quiet hum of a world waiting for his twentieth birthday. November 11th, 2025. The first day of his fourth year. A milestone. He had fallen asleep thinking about dinner plans with Su-yeong, her laughter a bright echo in his memory.
This... was not his bed.
The air was a physical presence, thick with decay—rust, wet dust, and the feral stench of rodents. He tried to sit up, but dizziness hit him like a wave. His limbs were heavy, alien things.
"What the hell...?"
The voice that left his lips wasn't his. It was higher. Softer. A boy's voice, cracking with a pubescent frailty he hadn't known in years.
Panic, cold and sharp, began to drill into the base of his skull. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, his hands splayed on the gritty floor. He stared at them. In the faint, dust-choked light spearing through a broken skylight far above, he saw them.
Small hands. Pale, smooth, and utterly unfamiliar. No scar on the left wrist from a dog bite since childhood. No callus on the middle finger from a lifetime of writing.
'No. No, this is a dream. A lucid dream. The kind people write forums about.'
He willed the warehouse to dissolve. He begged his mind to return to the familiar confines of his apartment, to the photo of his family on his desk—his father's steady smile, his mother's warm eyes, his junior brother and sister caught in a moment of frozen laughter. He prayed for the sound of Sonic and Freddy, his dog and cat, having their early morning brawl.
Nothing happened. Only the relentless plip… plip… plip… and the frantic skittering of unseen things in the shadows.
He looked down at his body, and the last vestiges of his rational mind crumbled.
He was naked. And he was… small. His frame was slight, his legs and arms spindly. The body of a twelve-year-old boy. A hysterical sob caught in his throat. This was impossible. He was a responsible student; he didn't black out from drinking, he wasn't a partyer. He'd been home, safe and solitary, anticipating a quiet celebration. There was no logical thread, however frayed, that could connect his old life to this moment.
'Okay, Red. Breathe. Assess. You are in an abandoned warehouse. You are… physically altered. You are disoriented. Find cover. Find something to wear.'
His eyes, adjusting to the gloom, scanned the cavernous space. It was a graveyard of industry. Hulking shapes of rusted machinery loomed like sleeping beasts. Shelves sagged under the weight of time and grime, lined with the ghostly shapes of corroded beakers and strange, unidentifiable instruments. A laboratory, perhaps? Long since given up to the elements. And there, draped over a barrel like a sloughed-off skin, was a splash of off-white. A lab coat.
He tried to stand. His legs buckled instantly, sending him crashing back to the concrete with a gasp of pain and shock. The impact jarred his teeth. It wasn't just weakness; his center of gravity was off, his limbs were shorter, his coordination completely out of sync with his mind's commands. He felt like a puppet with its strings tangled, his mind—the mind of a twenty-year-old man—sending signals to a body that no longer existed.
"What the fuck? What the actual fuck?"
The profanity, in that high, unfamiliar voice, sounded pitiful and lost, a child's curse in a man's nightmare.
Gritting his teeth, he crawled. Each movement was a lesson in profound frustration. His new muscles, untested and feeble, trembled with the strain. He reached the barrel, his small, pale fingers closing around the coarse, dusty fabric of the coat. He pulled it on. It was enormous on his shrunken frame, the sleeves swallowing his hands whole, the hem pooling around his bare feet like a grimy shroud. But it was cover. It was a semblance of dignity, a thin barrier between him and the terrifying vulnerability of his situation.
Wrapped in the oversized coat that smelled of mildew and forgotten experiments, he made for the source of the light—a vast, yawning doorway where a metal door had long since rotted from its hinges.
Stepping outside was like stepping into the end of the world.
The warehouse sat in a clearing being swallowed by nature. Moss carpeted the walls. Ivy strangled the windows. Weeds burst through cracked asphalt. The air smelled of rain and rot and wild green.
He pinched his arm hard enough to leave a welt. The sting was real. The red mark stayed.
This was no dream.
He was alive, and utterly, terrifyingly lost.