Oddly, Jen relaxed when the lights went off, losing some of the tension that the strange humming had given her. If the experiment had truly gone wrong, then there was no way it could have managed to affect the power mains to turn off the lights without also causing many more catastrophic effects. Black holes, extreme radiation, gravity altering effects and more all could have resulted from some sort of strange particle interaction, but Jen was pretty sure she would have noticed if she was being sucked into a singularity or being immersed in radiation. Since it only appeared to be the lights that were affected and the hum had now cut off, it was much more likely that this all was some sort of hazing prank thought up by the more experienced employees.

 "Alright guys, you got me. Good job. Now can you turn the lights back on?"

 Silence was her only answer. There were far too many loose objects in the lab for her to try and move in the dark so she stood in place, waiting for her co-workers to finish with their fun. A minute passed, then another. Getting tired of waiting, Jen slowly started to shuffle forwards. She held her hands in front of her to try and feel anything she might be running into, not wanting to run into and damage any of the computers. After shuffling a bit further, she stopped.

 She knew that the darkness could throw off a person's perception of distance, but the lab control room wasn't that large, and she should have hit a desk or a wall by now. On top of that, there was something about the darkness that was off. While it was indoors, there should have been at least a little light from further down the hallway, or the surge protector status lights. At first she hadn't given it much thought, but there had been enough time that her vision should have adjusted enough to begin to make use of the little light available. Except everything was still pitch black.

 Uncontrolled, Jen's rate of breathing started to increase, her imagination coming up with implausible and unnerving reasons for the inconsistencies. The darkness, once nothing more than a childish prank, was now the home to a million different monsters drawing closer with ill intent. Her once disdained chair and desk were now a safe haven compared to the infinite limbo she now imagined.

 Jen mentally clamped down hard. She’d always enjoyed her active imagination, proud of being able to think outside the box, but at the moment it seemed like a liability. She needed to stay focused and calm, to put her mind to work on making it through this prank without embarrassing herself, without freaking out. Unable to think of a different topic to switch her runaway brain to, she tried to meditate instead. It wasn't something she had ever really had much success with, but as she pictured the Flame and the Void exercise she had used in the past, copied from her fiction, she found her rate of breathing slowing down, the runaway fears fading as she pictured feeding them to the consuming flame.

 Now calm, Jen let out her breath again. Even if something weird had happened, and this wasn’t a prank at all, it shouldn’t matter. She was a scientist, and when faced with the unknown, a scientist tries to understand and quantify. Buoyed and resolved by that thought, she started to move forward again, this time placing each nine-inch-long foot directly in front of the other, as if walking on a tightrope. Forty footsteps and thirty feet in distance later she stopped. Even if her feet were shorter than she remembered, or her distance curved a little, the thirty feet she travelled was still far greater than the fifteen by twenty office that the had been in until recently. There was no way to explain this fact other than to bring in extraordinary physics. With the weird humming coming from that last experiment, there was even an obvious culprit at hand to explain the source of the strange event. The timing was too close for it to be mere coincidence.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

 "Well, it could always be coincidence. It just seems extremely unlikely." Jen amended, speaking out loud to break up the complete silence around her. Now that she was paying more attention to her surroundings, Jen confirmed her hypothesis that she was in a different location; the open acoustics of this pitch dark place vastly different from those of her noise absorbent office.

 Now mostly sure that this wasn’t a joke, Jen tried to come up with explanations as to what exactly had happened. It didn’t matter how absurd or implausible they were, simply having hypotheses to try and prove or disprove would keep her mind focused, keep it away from the panicking hysteria that even now lurked at the edges of her thoughts.

 Pulling on her pop cultural knowledge, Jen managed to come up with three main theories. First, that she had been shrunk, with the size change of her eyes’ cones and rods changing the wavelengths of light they could absorb. The laminated flooring would be just as textureless at her smaller size, and it could explain why she hadn’t run into anything yet.

 Hallucination was her second theory. A particle beam from the reaction intersected with some neurons in her brain making her believe she was trapped in a dark place of some sort, while in reality she was simply lying on the floor, perhaps drooling a little. Relatively difficult to disprove, as any proof could merely be evidence of the existence of a more complex illusion.

 Her final and favorite theory was that of teleportation. If teleportation were to be found possible, it could reshape the world, opening up paths of invention that were previously unthinkable. Beyond that, Jen didn’t want to find out she was still stuck in her office. She wanted to explore, to discover new things, to boldly go where no woman has gone before. Blushing a little, she stopped that train of thought. It was good to dream, but right now it was better to stay focused on her present circumstances.

 After thinking for a little while longer, Jen was unable to come up with any other pseudo-plausible explanation. Recalling the different acoustics from earlier, she yelled "ECHO!", and was slightly surprised to hear a faint echo coming back to her. There were walls around somewhere to reflect the noise, even if they were still an unknown distance away.

 The distance niggled in her mind for a moment, and then she realized why. If she was merely shrunk, then the distance from her to the walls would still be less than twenty feet at the furthest. Since the speed of sound in air was constant, if she had been shrunk then the walls would still be too close to produce a noticeable delay echo. And since there wasn’t much to do if this was all a hallucination of some sort, Jen decided to treat her surroundings as a whole new place to explore, with unknown things waiting to be discovered.

 While a small nervous part of her mind was still afraid of making noise and drawing an unknown, unfriendly, something to her location, the larger part realized that she had to act in some way to move forward in this new world. To stay still was to die a slow death of starvation and thirst. Recalling a documentary on the pain of starvation Jen shuddered slightly. Better a merciful death at the hands of a predator than that agony.

 Firming up her determination, Jen clapped her hands, a sharp loud noise. Listening carefully, she tried to figure out what direction the echo was loudest in, and thus the closest wall. If she could find a wall, she could give herself a definitive direction to travel in. Without it, and without any light or landmarks to orient herself by, it was far too likely to end up walking in circles. A few more claps, and Jen was confident enough to start moving, stopping every twenty steps to check her direction again. Whether the walls were getting closer or just from the practice, she found it easier to pick out the noise of the echo as she ventured into the dark.