Did I imagine it?

Then I felt it again. Something slithered against my calf, something long, dragging against my leg with an audible, soft scraping swish. Nope, I definitely did not imagine that.

Something had found me.

The sensation vanished, but I didn’t dare move. Every hair on my body stood on end, tingling. I had been using heightened senses the whole time to search for any sign of someone or something else there in the mist with me, but I hadn’t detected anything and as I stood there frozen in mid-step, there was still nothing. Just a still, endless quiet. I waited, then I waited some more, but I saw and heard nothing and didn’t feel it against my leg again.

Perhaps whatever it was that had brushed against me had decided it was a false alarm and moved on. Yeah, let’s go with that.

I started walking again, now focusing my senses down in search of anything that might be lurking under the mist, and I noticed a flaw in my nobody can see me in the void if I’m made of void plan. As I moved, the motion stirred up little eddies in the mist. Could that be how I’d been found?

It was too risky to continue on like this. Fortunately, I had options. I was the human Swiss army knife, remember?

Akari’s ability to fly was absolutely something I wanted and I’d synthesized a custom version that included telekinesis. Akari’s one complaint about her power was that she wished she could be more manouverable. The telekinesis added a little push that made me able to dodge better and stop faster mid-air.

I turned it on and ever so slowly lifted myself up above the surface of the mist, then hovered there for a while to see if I’d drawn any attention from the unknown denizens of the void. Didn’t seem like it.

I started flying toward the tower. Nothing. And flying. Still nothing. More flying, more nothing. And more flying. And more.

Was it just me or was I not getting any closer to that tower?

I looked behind me. The black pillar of the entrance was there, about as far away as you’d expect for the amount I’d traveled so far. I looked back at the tower. Just how far was it? I was reluctant to ping the tower with radar, not knowing if that would alert the things in the fog. There had to be another way.

A-ha.

I held my hand up in front of me, thinking I could gague how tall the tower appeared by measuring it against my finger, then compare it to another reading I’d take after I’d flown some more to see if it had grown larger as I got closer, but my finger just blended in with the void. I didn’t dare bring anything out of my inventory to use a measuring stick either, that would defeat the whole purpose of this experiment.

Then I had an idea. Whenever I opened my Status it always appeared in the same place in my field of vision, so I could use it as an even more accurate measuring tool than my finger would’ve been. Plus, the Status screen was not physically there, I was pretty sure it was a virtual thing superimposed over what I was actually seeing, so it probably shouldn’t catch anything’s attention. I hoped.

So I opened it and moved my head until I lined up the bottom of the tower with the bottom of the word Void in my list of affinities. The top of the tower was lined up with the top of the word Shadow. There. I had a convenient benchmark to measure against. It was clumsy, but it’d do. I made a mental note to synthesize a range-finder power. Later.

Right. Let’s keep going.

I maintained a slow, steady, speed as I glided soundlessly forward. Always looking, always listening, always expecting something to suddenly squirm up through the mist to grab me and drag me down. But there was nothing. I used the clock I’d convinced System to create to time myself, and went on for another twenty minutes before stopping again. Still nothing else appeared, but the tower’s height on my Status hadn’t changed, not even a bit. I was no closer now than I’d been twenty minutes earlier. Unless the tower was so tall, and so far away, that I still hadn’t come far enough to make a noticeable difference. My kingdom for a range-finder ability.

If it really was that far then I needed a new plan. It could’ve taken me hours, if not days to reach it. For all I knew I could’ve flown forever and not gotten any closer.

Stupid Void.

I hovered for a while to take stock of my situation. My travels had taken me visibly away from the entrance, but hadn’t brought me any noticeably closer to the tower. I looked at the tower with telescopic vision and almost said “Whoah,” but managed to stop myself from making a noise that might attract attention.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

What the hell? It looked like it was right there in front of me, filling my entire field of vision with nothing but black.

I turned off the super vision, and the tower went back to where it was, off in the fathomless distance. I toggled the telescopic vision back on, but not at full power, and there it was, right in front of me again. I adjusted the magnification so that I could see the whole tower. With nothing else to compare it to I had no way of judging distance. It seemed tall, but again I had no benchmark for comparison. Maybe it was more accurate to say it felt tall.

The tower was the same deep, total black as the entrance pillar, but its sides slowly narrowed as it rose and it ended in a flattened top instead of rising up forever. I could make out every detail of it, which was easy, because it had none. There were no windows. The outer wall was perfectly smooth. No door. It appeared to be a perfect, black pyramid, or perhaps a cone, it was impossible to tell which, with its top lopped off. And it appeared to be right there in front of me.

Could be close, could be far away. Which was it, and how could I get there?

Perhaps more importantly, was it actually a tower or had I just assumed that the last time I was there and hadn’t considered another possibility?

I had no reason to vacate the dungeon yet, and lacking any better ideas I started flying forward again, looking through my enhanced sense of sight for any hint of a change. There was none. No matter how far I flew I didn’t appear to get any closer. For all I knew, I shouldn’t even trust what I was seeing.

But sight was the only sense I could use in this situation. If I couldn’t trust it, what could I trust? Other senses? I hadn’t built a scent sensor into my Second Skin suit so that sense was off the table, not that it would help anyway.

Taste was useless, I’d need to remove the suit to put anything in my mouth, and I had no idea if native Void objects had any taste anyway, or how it could possibly help determine how far the tower was. And even if there was something around that I could lick without revealing myself there’s no way I would’ve tried. No way in hell.

Apart from the occasional rustle or clicking when something swished under me in the mist, the Void was utterly silent, and completely without odor.

All I had were my eyes. But illusions were part of this world and it’d make sense if they were associated with Void. Morgan had illusion powers, and her affinty was Void. If my eyes could easily be deceived I shouldn’t rely on them. But they were all I had.

Or were they?

What about touch?

No way, could it be that simple?

I closed my eyes so I could completely focus on touch and not be fooled by sight, then held my hands out in front of me as though feeling my way around in the dark, and started flying.

Almost immediately, my fingers bumped against something firm but squishy.

I opened my eyes.

In front of me loomed an amorphous blob of faintly luminous goo about the size of a minivan. I instinctively flew backwards to get away from it, but after only a few feet I was stopped when my back bumped against something solid. I stayed there, paralyzed with a fear that wasn’t caused by any power, expecting the blob to ooze over and eat me at any moment. But it didn’t. It didn’t do anything. The terror began to relax and took stock of my situation.

I felt the solid surface behind me. It was perfectly smooth with a slight concave curve to it. I allowed myself to take my eyes off the blob to look around and came to the conclusion that I was inside. Inside of what I had no clue, but the mist was gone and a subtle variation in the blackness of the floor compared to the blackness of the walls told me it was a cylindrical room with blacker than black walls and a slightly less black floor. The blob and I were the only things in the room, or at least we were the only things I could see.

Am I inside the tower?

Yes.

Wait, what? Did I just think that?

No.

What the hell? I know I didn’t think that. So where is it coming from and why is it in my head?

There was a squelching sound and the blob’s surface rippled as it shrunk down to the size of an ottoman. With it no longer being so big I could see that it was kind of like Jane’s slime, but different. Then I saw something that I wished I could unsee.

Bubbles were inflating on the blob’s surface in scattered patches, and when they reached a certain size they ruptured, becoming myriads of unblinking eyes forming then un-forming, disturbing little occular pustules that burst randomly with greenish light, leaving behind small round craters that slowly sealed over, only to give rise to new patches of those nefarious bubbles that frothed as they formed then goggled when they became eyes before bursting into more gaping holes, endlessly repeating the cycle in unpredictable splotches over the blob’s entire trembling surface.

No, it wasn’t like a slime. It was like a miniature Shoggoth.

It’s worth noting that I have this phobia, more of a condition, really, trypophobia it’s called, and it means that I get the screaming heebie-jeebies when I see closely packed holes. Certain corals trigger it, and for obvious reasons I can never relax in a bubble bath. And as delicious as they are, I cannot eat crumpets because, well, so many holes. And there’s this toad, the most vile and disturbing Surinam toad, whose babies grow from eggs to tadpoles to mature little toads all inside the flesh of their mother’s back. When they're big enough, the baby toads break through leaving behind (God just thinking about it makes my skin crawl) gaping holes in her back.

So you can imagine how I felt watching this thing as its heinous eyes watched me back, glowing and blinking like malevolent marbles that popped into distressing little craters floating on the surface of a giant protoplasmic amoeba from another dimension of time and space.

Hello.

Uh oh. I think I just heard this thing say hi to me in my head.

That’s it. I’ve finally gone insane, haven’t I?