Bartholomew Watson, a systems engineer of such profound ordinariness that he could blend seamlessly into a beige wall, found himself, as was his occasional wont, in a place he strictly shouldn’t have been. Namely, the manager's washroom. After hours, of course. One wouldn't want to be caught. Not by the manager, anyway.

Now, Bartholomew wasn't a criminal mastermind. He wasn't even a particularly bold petty thief. He simply appreciated the finer things in life, or at least, the slightly-better-than-average things. The manager's washroom, for instance, boasted a toilet roll of a softness that could only be described as "cloud-adjacent," and a soap dispenser that dispensed a lavender-scented foam of unsettlingly luxurious consistency. These were the simple pleasures denied the likes of Bartholomew, relegated as he was to the standard, sandpaper-adjacent toilet roll and the vaguely antiseptic soap of the common cubicle dweller.

Tonight, however, was different. Tonight, Bartholomew had decided to indulge in a moment of quiet rebellion, a brief escape from the tyranny of the mundane. He'd locked the door, settled onto the aforementioned cloud-adjacent throne, and was enjoying a moment of quiet contemplation, a moment punctuated only by the gentle whir of the building's ventilation system.

Then, the smell came.

It wasn't a subtle smell. It wasn't a "perhaps someone forgot to flush" smell. It was a smell that could curdle milk at fifty paces, a smell that could make a gargoyle weep. It was a smell that suggested something truly, profoundly wrong had taken place within the confines of the porcelain bowl.

Bartholomew, a man of cautious optimism, initially assumed it was merely a rogue sausage roll, perhaps left behind by a manager with a particularly… robust… digestive system. But as the smell intensified, it took on a more sinister quality, a hint of something ancient and unwholesome.

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He peered into the bowl, his nose wrinkling like a pug in a lemon grove. There was nothing visible, just the usual swirl of water and the faint, unsettling shimmer of something… else.

"Perhaps," he muttered to himself, "a particularly potent cleaning solution?"

He reached for the flush handle, a desperate attempt to banish the olfactory horror back to whatever dark dimension it had crawled from. He pressed the button, and the toilet responded with a gurgle that sounded suspiciously like a death rattle.

Then, the water began to swirl. Not the usual, polite swirl of a standard flush, but a violent, vortex-like maelstrom, a miniature whirlpool of doom. The smell intensified, becoming almost tangible, a physical presence that pressed against his nostrils and made his eyes water.

Before he could react, before he could even utter a panicked "Oh, bother," the water surged, and Bartholomew found himself being dragged down, down, down into the swirling abyss, his cries muffled by the gurgling water and the overwhelming stench.

He felt a moment of profound, existential dread, the kind of dread usually reserved for accountants facing an audit or pigeons realizing they've landed on a freshly waxed statue. He flailed, he kicked, he tried to scream, but it was no use. The vortex had him, and it wasn't letting go.

The world dissolved into a blur of swirling water and noxious fumes. He felt a strange pressure, a squeezing sensation, as if he were being forced through a particularly narrow and unpleasant tube. Then, everything went black.

Bartholomew Watson, systems engineer, connoisseur of the cloud-adjacent toilet roll, and unwitting voyager through the porcelain portal, had vanished. And somewhere, in a place far stranger than he could ever have imagined, a new adventure was about to begin, one that would involve considerably less plumbing or at least a different sort, and considerably more… well, he'd find out soon enough.