I continue to play with the hair gun for a while, covering various surfaces in different sized patches of hair. But now it is time for the real test. The longer I ‘charge’ the hair gun, the bigger the patch of hair it creates. The test now is that I have been charging the hair gun, button down, for the last minute and a half already. The high pitched noise it makes has stopped increasing in intensity at this point, signaling to me that it has reached max power. Well at least it didn’t explode.

I point the hair gun at a patch of ground about forty meters away and release the button.

Next thing I know, I’m happily sailing through the air and then rolling across the ground until I come to a stop. Fuck! I’m lucky I’m just banged up and bruised, and that I didn’t break any bones! When I released the trigger a patch of hair / fur instantaneously sprouted up about fifty fucking meters in diameter, with enough force to knock me back and send me sailing through the air, despite the fur being really soft. Actually that’s a good thing, if the fur had been hard, it probably would have killed me from the impact.

Upon closer inspection the furball is about fifty meters high and is layered. At its base, there are thick strands of hair, some with a diameter as much as a meter. Of these super thick fibres that resemble frikkin tree trunks, other smaller fibers sprout outwards, each with smaller diameters. This carries on in many layers, in increasing depth and complexity, smaller and smaller hairs sprouting off of each other. The outermost circumference is layered with the usual very fine cat-like fur.

It is pretty impressive actually and I would probably stand here even longer gawking at it, if my stomach had not reminded me of the urgency of my situation. I’m still completely fucked and as such, I clip the hairgun onto my pants and carry on my not so merry way, following the edge of the world once again.

About another thirty minutes pass, maybe more and I do not encounter any other suspicious pillars. I do however almost fall over myself when I realise that in my field of view now stands another Archway! I quickly run up it, but my hopes are dashed when I notice that nearby there is a drone and broom lying on the ground. You are fucking kidding me! west loops back around to east! This place is seriously fucked up!

I walk back to the edge of the world and as I stare into the nothingness I am seriously half tempted to just jump off. Either something will happen or I’ll die, the latter of which I’m going to be doing regardless if I don’t find a way out of this place.

I turn around to face the North and wonder if I should just start walking in that direction. I do however put a pause to that thought, as something else occurs to me. The portal technically has two sides to it. I walk up to its south side, the side I have not yet touched and slowly bring my hand up to it, till it actually touches the portal.

It’s not pushing me away! Upon contact with it, it once again sucks in my hand, arm and rest of my body and forces my through it.

Smack! Ouch! I am back in my bedroom once more and the portal graciously threw me out, face first, into my wardrobe cupboard. Well despite the pain I am genuinely happy to be back, and alive for that matter.

So each archway that is ‘connected’ has a corresponding ‘in’ and ‘out’ direction, that is strange, but interesting. Least I now know that I can go to that place and come back. I walk over to my bed and examine my phone, It’s only been an hour and a half, more or less what it felt like in there. So that answers another question, there is no weird time warp, six hour time limit out here, is a six hour time limit in there.

But first things first, I’m really hungry. I quickly walk down stairs to approach my kitchen, when I notice that once again there is a cat on my kitchen counter and it is eating my leftover pizza. Does my neighbour not actually feed this fucking cat at all?

I reach for my hairgun, my blood boiling, and charge it for several seconds before releasing. The cat immediately turns into a puffy ball of fur. The ‘cat?’ jumps nearly a meter into the air in shock and when it lands it starts twisting, diving and hopping about frantically trying to escape its new found fur coat.

The cat eventually gets its bearings a bit and makes a beeline for the open window, obviously hoping to escape its furry pursuer, but naturally to no avail. I also don’t think the cat can see properly since it bangs into the closed portion of the window first, before managing to find the open part. This is only natural I guess since there is so much fur, that I can’t even tell where the cats head or tail is, save for guessing based on the direction the cat is running in.

None of this really matters though as I am currently rolling on the floor with laughter and I remain this way for at least another full minute. At which point my stomach really hurts and I am having a hard time breathing already. But damn, if that was not the funniest thing I have ever seen in my entire fucking life.

I get up wondering if perhaps I’ve screwed myself over here. If my neighbour doesn’t recognise his cat after that, or accept that it’s his, then he DEFINITELY will not be feeding it anymore and I’ll probably be stuck with it even more often. On the plus side, my neighbour may think it’s some kind of mutant monster and kill it on the spot, who knows.

I proceed to eat the one and only pizza slice that is untouched, that cat was really fucking hungry it seems. It’s almost 4PM now, so I decide to wait for the portal to close before running any more tests. In the meantime I decide to make supper, since I will be getting hungry again real soon after only one slice of pizza.

I whip up some homemade spaghetti bolognaise, eat a little of it and leave the rest of it on the counter for later. I pass the rest of the time, by playing some Dark Souls 3.

Once the portal finally closes, it’s around 8PM. I load up a backpack this time, with some packets of crisps, some bottles of water a few small basic tools, some tape and a stack of colored sticky notes, you never know. I also grab my phone and this time, with much less trepidation, I activate the portal and step through.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

Once out the other side, I manage to land on my feet this time without tumbling over. I am back in ‘The Zone’, that’s what I’m going to call it from now on.

The first thing I need to try out is the drone. I hook up my phone and voila it works, I once again have control over the drone. So there’s no problem using the wireless in this place at least, it just can’t transmit through the portal. I do some tests, to test both distance and height of the drone in terms of range, but this shitty little model can only travel about ten meters before it loses connection and slowly hovers back to the ground. In this place that kind of range is utterly useless, so I give up on any possible usage of the drone for exploration.

I put the drone in my backpack, just in case, and pocket my phone too. Lastly I pick up the broom and sling that over my shoulder like a rifle salute. I want my phone nearby so I can keep an eye on the time and you never can tell when the broom might come in handy, like knocking things off a high perch for example.

The direction of choice this time, shall be North, in part because the other three directions are pointless at this point. I shall keep an eye on the time and allow for up to two hours of heading north at most, followed by at most two hours returning and a two hour buffer window to make sure I don’t accidentally get trapped here.

With that decided, I head north.

I pass many pillars while travelling north, none of them special of course, or at least that I’m aware of. I am reasonably confident in my ability to go north and not veer of course, thanks to the fact that all the pillars are aligned to the same fixed ninety degrees rotation axis. This makes it easy enough to go ‘straight’, just by keeping an eye on the pillars around you.

After traveling for about forty five minutes, I come to yet again another edge. I can see nothing in the distance and nothing below, over the edge. Is this all there is to it? Maybe somewhere else along this edge, there is a path to continue on?

I suspect that if I go straight west here, that I would eventually end up right back where I’m standing right now, so I place a few pink sticky notes on the ground. I have yet to feel any kind of wind in this place, at most just a very very light breeze so far, nothing that could uproot a sticky note. Making it the perfect marker for this.

I start following the ‘North Edge’, a name I have decided on, to differentiate it from the now officially renamed ‘South Edge’. If I keep following the edge westwards, and eventually come back to my pink sticky notes, then I know I have mapped the entirety of the edges of this world, all two of them LoL. Let’s hope that is not the case, would seem like an awful waste of an alternate reality.

After walking for about fifteen minutes, passing yet more boring pillars, I finally see something in the distance. Past the North Edge, about forty meters across the void, I see another platform. It looks identical to the one I’ve been travelling around on, also about three meters thick and suspended in mid air. There must some kind of path or bridge across to it, further on.

Travelling up a bit more, I can now see the full expanse of the ‘’adjacent’ platform. It runs in parallel to my platform, separated by a forty meter gap, for a length of about a hundred meters and extending back into the fog for as far as I can see, into territory unknown. There is no bridge across to it, well at least not in the traditional sense.

What there is, are about a hundred scattered blue translucent platforms, almost like glass. They come in varying sizes of squares and rectangles, of anything from a meter to three meters in length per side and are spaced apart quite randomly, with gaps ranging from as little as a ten centimeters to much much more than that.

It probably wouldn’t be that difficult to hop from one to another all the way to the other side, provided that they are not slippery and will not break or disappear if you step on them. The part that is strange though, is that at any given time, about half of the platforms are illuminated, or glowing if you will. Watching for a while I notice that each and every platform is toggling between an illuminated state and a ‘off’ state at some kind of fixed interval. I have a very bad feeling about this.

I take my broom and poke one of the illuminated platforms right in front of me. Nothing strange there. So I give a decently hard swing of the broom and strike the suspended platform. There is a reassuring thud sound, it would seem the platform is sturdy and not about to fall out of the sky. I wait a few seconds for the platform to turn ‘off’ and then try poking it with the broom again, only this time the broom passes right through the platform, like it isn’t even there.

Holy shit. It’s a stock standard arcade-disappearing-timed-platforms level!

No.

Just fucking, NO!

That is not happening, forget it. I have played too many platformers to know that a ‘level’ of this difficulty would require numerous deaths before you get the timings and the feel for it down. I’m not Mario, I don’t get multiple lives here. Well, I think anyway.

I get up and have instantly decided to forget about this madness and see if there is anything else along the North Edge of interest. But before I leave, my inner scientist gets the better of me and I decide to conduct one more experiment. I stick the broom through an ‘off’ platform and wait. As soon as the platform solidifies, the broom is instantly cut in two, like the platform occupied the space where a portion of the broomstick was supposed to be and simply blinked it out of existence. Regardless, I watch helplessly as the broom brush falls into the distance, no longer attached to the broom, and out of sight. Damn.

Now I am seriously over this. I get up and carry on walking west. After about another forty five minutes however, I reach a patch of ground that has some pink sticky notes on it. Shit.

So there really is no other way forward. Still I do not see myself dying trying to become a real life ‘Islander’, that’s just not happening. Regardless, It’s been about two hours now, I need to head back.

I leave and head directly south from the pink sticky notes and manage to travel straight enough, that after an hour I see the Archway a couple hundred meters to my left and front. I travel back home using the reverse side of the portal and arrive back in my bedroom at 11:15PM. Honestly I’m exhausted, I decide to get some more of my delicious leftover spaghetti before heading to bed.

I dump my backpack in the corner of my bedroom, as well as my broom ‘stick’ and head downstairs to the kitchen. When I arrive, I am greeted by a giant ball of fur that is covered in a considerable amount of spaghetti sauce. Seriously?

Not only has this fucking furball not learnt its lesson, but it seems to have adjusted to living the life of a giant sized furball just fine. Not only that but I no longer have spaghetti to eat, at least not any that is not positively swimming in grey alien hairs!

I walk over to the kitchen counter and pick up the ‘cat?’ and carry him up stairs. He is still busy munching quite lazily on the food in his mouth. At least I think he is, based on the sounds he is making, it’s not like I could actually see his head or anything.

Upon reaching my bedroom I, with a genuine heartfelt grin on my face, chuck the fucking hairball into the portal. Good luck finding something to eat over there fleabag.

At this point I’m truly exasperated and exhausted, so I just switch off the lights and jump into bed. Before I close my eyes and let my tired body drift off to sleep, I realise that the open shimmering portal that still has two and a half hours left on it, makes for a rather pretty and soft-light lava lamp.