I found myself in a strange, shifting surroundings, still unable to move. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing at first. Was this the alien version of a loading screen? Did the panoply of colors and shapes mean something to my captors?

No matter how I strained my muscles, I couldn’t twitch so much as an eyelid. The only thing I could affect was my own vision, toggling on and off my thermal sight. What I saw in my thermal sight was still nonsensical and useless, so it didn’t make much -

Wait. Was it nonsensical?

With my thermal sight overlapping with normal vision, I started to notice connections between the morphing shapes. Groupings.

I had a flash of insight: They’re not changing shape at all. I’m just seeing different parts of them.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a morning person, but Meghan made anyone look like an early bird. On weekends, I’d get up before her with the kids and get them breakfast, and then we’d cozy up on the couch to watch science videos together on YouTube. It was a tradition that had begun several years ago, when Micah, my oldest, was still small enough to claim he wanted to grow up to be an “engineerer.”

Sometimes we watched people make stuff, melting metal and planing wood to create beautiful objects. Sometimes we watched silly things, people making mazes for squirrels or Rube Goldberg machines. But sometimes we’d just watch videos on science or math: fun statistics tricks and counterintuitive mathematical proofs, videos talking about hotels with infinite doors and infinite occupants, videos explaining the strange physics of the cosmos. The kids could only get a fraction of it - especially Cassie, my youngest, who was still struggling with counting - but they’d watch them with me anyhow, as long as I squeezed them between more accessible fare.

It was one of those videos I was thinking of now. It had been talking about four-dimensional cubes, and higher and lower dimensions in general. As part of the video, they’d illustrated what a three-dimensional person like myself would look like to someone who could only perceive in two dimensions. I wouldn’t look like one solid shape as I passed through their field of view: each fingertip would appear as a separate circle that would merge into an oblong oval at my palm, then shrink again as the plane passed through my wrist. If my fingers - or any parts of my body - were bent, it would become even more complicated, because what looked to me like one solid arm might appear as an insane series of floating bubbles that split apart and merged together almost at random.

Even for someone who understood life in three dimensions, getting an accurate picture of myself from a series of vertical slices would be a challenge. To someone who had no context? Who thought only in circles and squares, not spheres and cubes? Good luck.

I was that “flat” person, I was sure of it. The stiff clingwrap was some kind of protective field to keep me intact as they dragged me through a higher dimension. All these weird shapes were just three-dimensional “slices” of four-dimensional objects. Or five-dimensional, I guess. Who knew?

It was oddly comforting. As much as I liked Star Trek, the idea of being taken apart and put back together somewhere else was a horrifying way to transport people. Why not just assemble the atoms properly at the destination while leaving them intact at the departure place? If it had been taking the actual atoms, there’s no way Riker could have been split into two, which just shows that-

I blinked. Then, I realized that I’d been able to blink, and blinked again. I was in a real place again, a real, normal, three-dimensional place. My efforts to make sense of the area I’d been in a few seconds ago had partly been an effort to distract myself from the possibility I’d made a terrible mistake. I'd had only vague expectations for what might be asked of me when I accepted the challenge, but the higher-dimensional area had still shocked me. I was relieved I wasn’t going to be required to navigate it.

Now I was in a flat gray room. The floor, ceiling, and walls were uniform in color, but I could see two door-sized rectangles with my thermal vision. Was what I could see with my regular vision an illusion? Hm. No. The “door” shape didn’t feel any different to touch than the rest of the wall. Perhaps there was a button somewhere, or a trigger.

A gasp let me know I wasn’t alone. I spun, bringing my staff in between me and whoever had joined me. My helmet and goggles should protect me from most lethal attacks, but I wished I had more than a neck warmer to protect my throat and spine. Some chest and back armor wouldn’t go amiss either, especially if I could find something flexible… but it was too late for that today.

The woman in the room with me was covered in scales similar to Zephyr’s but in a different shade. She had an actual sword, a short, Japanese-looking affair, which she held in front of herself protectively, much as I was holding my staff. Her posture was clearly defensive.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“I’m not a monster! I-”

An alien voice cut her off.

Transfers complete. You must each choose a different door and follow your color to the end of the course. The first of each pair to reach the end wins the Blueprint. The doors will appear in 13 seconds.

So, I wasn’t supposed to be able to see the door yet. I nodded at my opponent and turned halfway away from her. Most of my focus was on the door, but I didn’t want her changing her mind and attacking while my back was turned. She seemed to relax as I broke my focus, keeping me in sight much as I was doing with her, but scanning the walls for the promised doors.

As soon as it appeared, I was off like a shot, bursting through a wall of blue mist and pelting along a dull gray hallway. Another misty door sat just ahead and I hurtled through, slowing only as my feet plunged deeply into sand on the other side.

Should have been more careful coming through, since I can’t see through the door, I thought. I’d gotten lucky this time, though. My feet didn’t sink any further, and nothing attacked immediately.

I am in a race, I reminded myself, and started moving forward.

The landscape was “alien desert.” The sand itself could have come from earth, but instead of green cacti, there were glistening navy-blue orbs, cool enough despite their dark coloration that I suspected they were filled with water.

Or some other liquid. They don’t have to be filled with anything nice.

Tall pillars stuck out of the dunes, their placement random, like a giant had dropped a box of toothpicks. Small bush-like growths were scattered along their surface. Some of the bushes were different colors, and I flicked Infrared Vision off-and-on, frowning. Yeah: some of those weren’t bushes. They were spacedogs. Without my thermal sight, there wasn’t a big difference in appearance, but with it, I could easily pick out three “bushes” that ran hotter than their counterparts.

There was one other change. I’d come in with Infrared Vision active, and it had been immediately apparent to me that I was in a long, rectangular room. Turning it off was freaky. The telltale signs of the walls vanished. If not for the blue door behind me and another I could see in the distance, I could easily believe I’d been transported across the galaxy to an alien planet.

Maybe I have.

The thought was unsettling, and I pushed it aside. My location didn’t matter; what I needed to do was clear. Three spacedogs waited between me and the exit, a “challenge” I could handle without breaking a sweat if it wasn’t for the heat of the faux-desert. The monsters didn’t disappear when I killed them, so I took an extra few seconds being certain that each was dead.

I wondered about the difference - were these monsters real animals, where the ones I’d encountered before were just some kind of simulation? Why the difference? There wasn’t enough information to come to a conclusion, but I filed the oddity away. Maybe eventually, these would all add up to something useful.

Then I was out the door, into another featureless corridor, and nearly fell flat on my face.

What the hell? It’s like gravity tripled. Or more? What kind of anime nonsense is this?

I caught myself on my staff and plodded forward, each step its own accomplishment. The extra weight seemed spread evenly across my body. Every limb was difficult to lift, and even my earlobes and eyelids felt heavy.

This is stupid. Why are they doing this to me? It’s interesting that they can. I wonder if we can take gravity-manipulation abilities. Having to lift less weight would make air travel a lot more feasible.

The corridor was fairly short, so while the increased gravity was frustrating, it didn’t slow me down too much. The trip through the hallway took a minute as opposed to a few seconds.

It still irritated me.

I hope they did the same thing to my opponent.

The next chamber was honestly gorgeous. A waterfall crashed down in one corner and a stream flowed through a mix of mosses and plants I didn’t recognize, but similar enough to Earth plants to feel familiar. Tall “trees” like giant spinach plants spread massive leaves overhead, leaving the area shadowy and cool. It felt otherworldly, but in an almost magical way, like a fairyland.

Not gonna be any fairies here. If spacedogs were in the first chamber, there should be… ah, yep.

Infrared Vision helped me spot the pavemimics, so I set down my staff and unsheathed a pair of chef’s knives from my belt. The sharp edges would be far more useful against the flexible foes than the piercing tips JoeyT had helped me put on my staff.

I dove atop each monster, swiftly cutting them to bits, then retrieved my staff before bracing myself and edging out through the blue door.

If anything, the gravity was even higher this time. I sighed, then regretted it as my muscles worked overtime to draw another breath.

One more trudge through a high-gravity hallway, one more equally-trivial spar with some ram monsters on a purple-tinted mountainside. The monsters seemed identical to the ones I’d faced before, so I couldn’t figure out why there was a difference in how they died, leaving corpses behind. I was in an enclosed room: maybe real versions were easier to acquire, and the digital versions I’d faced before were used to keep them from wandering.

I dashed through the misty blue door incongruously sitting atop a rocky outcropping. I’d just finished off the last of the monsters they’d already sent at us. Would that be all there was to this “opportunity?” Was this just a first-day-of-class-quiz, where we were asked to demonstrate knowledge we should really have already?

The moment I stuck my hand through the aperture, I could tell I hadn’t reached the end.

Here we go again: another slow-paced slog.

At least at the other end of this, they’d have to give me something new.