Cold air hit him next, sharp enough to drag him the rest of the way up from whatever hole he'd fallen into. His eyes opened to darkness and a faint blue-white glow hovering above him, words floating in the air like they'd been burned into space.
[TRANSFER COMPLETE]
[WELCOME TO CARCERIS]
He blinked a few times, but the letters stayed fixed in the air. There was no flicker, no distortion—just cold certainty.
As the message faded, the rest of the room began to take shape. The surface under his face wasn't tile. It was metal plating—scratched, dented, seams running in uneven lines. Thin veins of something luminescent pulsed faintly between the panels, a slow, steady throb that reminded him of a heartbeat.
He pushed himself upright. The cold traveled through his palms, sending a shudder through his hands. Every part of him ached—not a bruise-deep ache, but something stranger. Like someone had taken him apart and put him back together.
"Okay," he rasped. His voice sounded raw. "That… wasn't a dream."
Pieces of the last few minutes—or hours, he couldn't tell—drifted back. The alley behind the diner. Everyone frozen mid-motion. Light hanging in front of him, forming words he didn't know how to process. Something examining him. Rejecting him. And then promptly discarding him here.
He sat up fully and immediately regretted moving that fast. His head spiked with pressure. He shut his eyes until it eased, then opened them again and forced himself to actually look around.
He was in a corridor. A big one. The walls curved slightly inward, arching above him like the inside of a ribcage. Thick metal supports were studded with service panels and recessed lights, most of which were dead. The ones that worked flickered between a dirty white and a dull orange glow in random intervals, like they couldn't commit to a setting.
Pipes ran along the ceiling in bundled clusters. Some dripped a slow, steady line of clear liquid that he assumed was water that hit the floor and spread into thin puddles. Fungal growth clung to the corners where the wall met the ground, patches of dark green and sickly blue pulsing with their own faint light in contrast to the flickering lights of the supports.
It didn't look like anything on Earth he'd ever seen. It didn't look like a movie set either. Everything had weight, grime, history. But that was crazy, wasn't it? There was no way any of this was real.
He rubbed at his face, then his arms, reassuring himself his body was still attached and in roughly the right order. Same clothes. Same apron. Same stupid crooked nametag.
The cigarette was gone. That seemed unfair.
"All right," he muttered. "Carceris."
Saying the name out loud didn't help. He wasn't necessarily a scholar when it came to geography, but something told him he wouldn't find it on any map.
He pushed himself the rest of the way up and got his feet under him. His legs felt unsteady, but they held. The air was cooler than he'd expected, with a metallic smell under something damp and earthy.
"Uh… Whatever you are," he said. "Open… menu? Status? HUD? Something?"
A faint shimmer flickered at the edge of his vision. He focused on it, and a translucent panel blinked into existence in front of him.
[USER: DYLAN CARTER]
[LEVEL: 1]
[ATTRIBUTES]
[POWER: 9]
[AGILITY: 11]
[VITALITY: 10]
[FOCUS: 12]
[SPIRIT: 13]
[AETHER: 0]
He stared at the numbers without really knowing what any of them meant. They looked… fine. Or maybe terrible. There was no baseline to compare them to, no hint at what "normal" even was. It was like he was in a video game.
His gaze slid down to the next section.
[CLASS: ???]
The question marks flickered. For a heartbeat, he thought he saw something else beneath them—faint letters trying to shape themselves into a word—then the panel glitched and snapped back to the placeholder.
"Of course," he said. "Even you don't think I'm worth anything."
No response. Just that quiet, steady hum in the background, so constant he hadn't noticed it until he listened for it—the vibration of very large machinery somewhere far away, or very deep below.
He tried focusing on the class line, the way you'd click something in a game. Nothing opened. No drop-down menu. No explanation. The question marks pulsed once in a way that felt almost annoyed, then went still.
"Cool," he said. "Love that for me."
The panel faded when he looked away, shrinking to a small, faint icon in the corner of his vision.
He turned in a slow circle, taking in more of the corridor. One end disappeared into shadow, the lights thinning until only the glow from a cluster of fungus patches marked the floor. The other stretched away for what felt like forever, interrupted by bulkhead-style doors at irregular intervals. Some were shut. A few stood open, darkness yawning behind them.
No signs. No arrows pointing to "Exit," "Lobby," or "Do Not Enter." Just the same repeating pattern of supports, pipes, and grime.
"Anybody here?" he called.
His voice carried farther than it should have, bouncing off the metal walls and coming back thinner. No one answered. Nothing moved. In hindsight that was probably a good thing. No telling what was considered somebody here.
He swallowed, suddenly aware of how loud his own breathing sounded.
Okay. Priorities. He needed a few things: to not die in the next ten minutes, to figure out what counted as food and water here, and to eventually get answers to whatever was running this place. And maybe, just maybe, find out how to get back home.
One thing at a time.
He picked a direction—the side where more of the lights were actually working—and started walking. His shoes squeaked slightly against the metal, leaving faint damp prints where condensation had gathered. He kept one hand near the wall, not because he needed the support, but because touching something solid helped.
As he went, he passed what might have been a doorway. The frame was there, squared off and recessed, but whatever door it had once held was gone. Inside was a small chamber filled with rusted racks and empty brackets, the floor littered with what looked like broken pieces of machinery. Or weapons. Or both.
He scanned the room, hoping for anything that looked remotely useful. Most of it was either fused together with age or corroded beyond recognition. He found a length of pipe that hadn't completely surrendered to rust, tested its weight, and decided it was better than nothing.
"Congratulations," he told the pipe. "You're hired."
He stepped back into the corridor, pipe in hand. The added weight felt comforting.
A soft whir hummed somewhere above him.
Dylan froze, head tilting up.
Something small and mechanical drifted along the ceiling track—a floating orb the size of a softball, metal panels segmented around a central lens. It moved with slow, deliberate passes, light from its underside sweeping the floor in a narrow beam.
He pressed himself against the wall, heart beating a little faster now. The orb continued down the corridor, passing over the puddles and the grime. The beam washed over the space where he'd been standing a moment earlier and kept going, unbothered.
No alarm. No change in hum. No little turrets unfolding from the ceiling and turning him into a cautionary tale. He watched it until it disappeared around a curve.
"Okay," he breathed. "So that's a thing."
He stayed where he was for another few seconds, just to see if anything else noticed him. Nothing did. Whatever that drone was, it either hadn't noticed him or hadn't cared. Neither option made him feel particularly safe.
He pushed off the wall and kept moving. After a while—long enough for his legs to start protesting and his throat to go dry—the corridor widened into a junction. Four branching paths, each marked by a rusted-out panel mounted at eye level. He stepped closer to the nearest one.
Etched into the surface was text—or something trying very hard to be text. The characters curved and hooked like an alphabet that had gotten scrambled in translation. It wasn't anything he recognized, but there was a pattern to it, a rhythm that suggested someone, at some point, had been able to read it. Someone who definitely wasn't a terrified diner server from Mill Street.
As he focused on the alien script, the lines shivered and reformed into words he could understand.
[CARCERIS LAYER: 3]
[STATUS: INACTIVE]
He swiped the back of his hand across his forehead, clearing a streak of cold sweat. Honestly, the flickering lights and dead wiring already said "inactive" pretty loudly.
A soft pulse blinked in the corner of his vision. An icon unfurled into a new notification.
[LOCATION REGISTERED: CARCERIS – LAYER 3]
[STABILIZATION: IN PROGRESS]
[CLASS: PENDING]
He stared at the panel for a few long seconds.
"Helpful as ever," he muttered. Pending was at least a step up from the row of question marks he'd been expecting.
The notification folded in on itself and vanished.
He looked down each of the four corridors in turn. Two were almost entirely dark, a few distant lights barely holding on. One was brighter but littered with more debris, some of it large enough to qualify as obstacles rather than trash. The last looked relatively clear, though the lights there flickered in a pattern that made his head hurt if he watched too long.
"Four choices, and I doubt any of them are going to be fun," he muttered.
He picked the relatively clear one. Not because he trusted it, but because at least he could see far enough ahead to spot something trying to eat his face. Then he started walking.
The hum under his feet stayed steady. The lights stayed fickle. The quiet pressed in around him. Every so often, he'd hear a distant clang or a low, echoing rumble that might have been machinery or might have been something larger moving around in another part of the structure. Nothing came close.
His mind kept wanting to drift back to the diner—to María at the grill, to Claire's bright grin, to the bent cigarette he hadn't gotten to finish—but each time the memories surfaced, the image of the sky splitting over the alley cut across them. The System messages. The feeling of being judged by something that didn't even consider him worth a proper explanation.
He shoved the thoughts away and focused on the next step. Then the next.
A few minutes later, the corridor opened up again, this time into a larger chamber. The ceiling vaulted higher, vanishing into shadow. Metal platforms rose at uneven heights, connected by narrow bridges and stairways. It looked like some kind of transit hub that hadn't seen proper use in a very long time.
At the far end of the room, a wide opening gaped in the wall, sealed off by a heavy door that had long since jammed halfway open. Beyond it, he could see only darkness.
Closer to him, along the right-hand wall, another sign flickered weakly.
He edged toward it, ready to bolt if anything decided now would be a great time for a jump scare.
This panel was cracked through the middle, but the lower half still glowed enough to read.
[TRANSFER LIFT – ACCESS RESTRICTED]
[ARBITER OVERRIDE REQUIRED]
"Yeah," Dylan said. "Not finding out who or what the arbiter is."
He turned away from the sealed lift and scanned the rest of the room. No obvious supplies. No convenient backpacks left by previous victims. Just more metal, more fungus, more places for bad decisions to hide.
The icon pulsed again.
He frowned and opened it.
[ADVISORY: INITIAL SURVIVAL WINDOW – 24:00:00]
[QUEST GENERATED]
[INITIAL SURVIVAL — 24 HOURS]
[Objective: Secure shelter and avoid environmental failure]
[Reward: +1 to all Attributes]
[Failure: death]
That last one didn't really need to be pointed out. The countdown started ticking down from twenty-four hours.
"Survive," he repeated. "Right. Sure. Let me just check my Boy Scout guide on how to survive on an alien planet."
Still, it had a point. Open space felt bad. Too many angles. Too many places for the next weird drone—or something worse—to come from.
Back near where he'd entered, he'd passed a side room with only one entrance and no obvious holes in the walls. Cramped, but defensible. He didn't love the idea of going backward already, but he loved "die in a big open room" less.
He glanced one more time at the half-open massive door, then at the inaccessible lift, then at the four exits leading deeper into… something.
"Twenty-four hours," he said softly. "Don't screw this up."
He tightened his grip on the makeshift weapon and retraced his steps toward the smaller room he'd seen before, the System timer ticking away in the corner of his vision.
Whatever this was, it wasn't going to make this easy. He wasn't sure what that said about him that a small part of him found the clarity almost… relieving. At least here, he thought, there was no need to keep pretending things were fine.
He ducked back into the narrow side chamber, scanned it one more time for anything that might try to kill him in his sleep, and settled in to plan how he was going to survive long enough to find out what the hell had happened to him.