A Thunderous Grinding of stone and metal Echoed for miles. It was followed by a rock splintering boom...A quake followed, shaking the world as it was. The world in question? An endless parking garage.

Hanging light fixtures fractured into a volley of glass splinters and electric embers!

The concrete ground split open into wide crevices—further widening with every rumble!

The stone pillars, holding firm the ground to the ceiling, crumbled into pebbles!

For miles, sections of the ceiling caved in one after another, and crashed down upon each other from floor into floor.

The chaos of it all was followed by hundreds of car alarms, unevenly blaring in a chaotic spine rippling song before being silenced one by one. Then everything went silent.

A natural light still illuminated some areas caused by the destruction.

Strangely however, it was a light with no source, and it shone through the fresh cracks and shattered windows.

What you would expect to be outside this garage was no sunny sky, no, not even a city skyline.

It was another garage, spaced apart by a canyon of deep darkness.

There was no sun, nor a sky—instead, just endless skyscrapers of stone and metal in place of a cloudy blue horizon.

The sky was the floor to another level of this perpetual garage. Symmetrical yet unnatural structures were in turn the Earth and terrain of this world.

Besides the ”natural” nonexistent source of illumination—caged lightbulb fixtures hung in uniformity in hundreds of rows and thousands of columns. Endless as the garage. Endless as the world.

The light never went out. Electricity never stopped flowing. It was an infinite source of energy...

All to power—? An endless infinite parking garage—floating in a perpetual desolate void.

It wasn't all the world had to offer however.

A beautiful landscape of rubble and destruction. Quiet. Unnatural. Alive and dead. The layered floors of the structure had collapsed just like a row of dominoes. Like the shelves of an old bookshelf, it was deformed. Yet, somehow, the rubble was slowly reforming itself back together as if it was healing.

Rocks gathered into piles, as if blown by a wind, and they gradually pieced themselves back together into thicker and more geometric shapes until it was finally complete and whole again.

Reformed into the pillars it had once been.

Once any structure was restored, a cloud of fire would poof out from thin air to show a status of being completed. It defied physics and reality in the strangest ways. But there were other quandaries in the structure of this world besides that. In some ways, less so reality defying, yet still strange nonetheless. Backwards signs, ramps that led to dead end walls, infinitely deep holes in the ground that could range from the size of an ant to the size of a small lake. In some areas, the road would twist out of the ground and spiral into the next level or two or three. For what purpose?

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It seemed like this place could never have originated from human hands. Perhaps never even touched by man. Not liveable by any means. And yet... Unfortunate circumstances make it an unfortunate reality that humanity can step foot in this cursed realm.

Something happened to be standing at the ledge of the garage window, viewing the concrete limbo skyline. No, perhaps someone not something. A human. A man. Not quite unordinary given the ever changing and abstract environment, besides the obvious lack of... life.

The man had a black and white beard and curly black and brown hair. Not a young man, but not old either. Old and young at the same time. Contradictory, like this world. His clothes were torn as if he was homeless. In fact he was. Far far away from home. There is no “home” in this world that any ordinary human could call worthy of living in. Let alone surviving. The best course would be to keep moving and to never stop for too long.

However, this man looked lost in time too. Dressed as if he was an architect or a scholar in Ancient Rome. The traveler here was just as odd as the environment. How he got here is not an easy story to tell. Not as simple as you would eventually come to conclude. A far deeper, darker story lay in the depth of this man. The Man bent himself away from the ledge and steered towards the direction from which the quakes originated from.

"Could it be?" He pondered aloud in a strained coarse voice. He had to pause his own thoughts to clear his throat. Many years since he had any reason to speak.

It was a nice reminder of knowing he could speak. That he could express himself. But, perhaps this was a moment that sorely needed expression. Like a faint hope. A reason to speak again. Without hesitation, he began to make his move and trekked swiftly in the direction of the tremors.

There were booming echoes of the structure, no longer breaking apart, but shifting back into place. Rebuilding itself into whatever it had once been. Healing, one could say, as if it was a living ecosystem. And in a lot of ways it was. Instead of trees: support columns. Instead of rivers: ventilation systems. And instead of grass: carpet.

There were intervals between patterns where the environment didn't just consist of concrete garages. Between every seven hundred forty-two columns there would occasionally be a seemingly endless corridor that would lead off into another area. He knew that if he ever followed down them he would never return here. So he sort of always just stuck around toiling in this concrete prison; wandering, endlessly. Hoping to find the unfindable.

The man strode past the occasional car. Once upon a time he wondered what the purpose of these contraptions were. Now he could care less after many millennia of fiddling with them to no avail. Like everything in this world, what at first started off as unexplainable, stayed unexplainable. He could only learn the names of certain things due to clues left behind and languages that he had to spend years decoding. More or less out of boredom, secondary to the possibility of learning hidden secrets.

In the corner of his eyes a rainbow of lights started pouring out from the cracks in the walls. He... dared not to even point an eye at the dancing lights in his peripheral. From what vague knowledge he had, they're formless creatures until looked upon. Taking the shape of one's own subconscious imagination and bending reality to bring it into a temporary existence. That's when they take you and pull you into the cracks in the walls. Fissures that lead to pocket worlds, but crush you before you even travel the full distance. He's seen many souls lost-completely gone forever just from being caught in their little trap.

They're just one of many creatures that occupy this concrete ecosystem. some of the least dangerous in fact… quite like himself.