This story begins with my life on our world, Earth.

I was then an average 36-year-old man, not too young but not too old. I wasn't particularly handsome either, with a protruding belly and my incipient baldness, I certainly didn't attract looks. I didn't have strong family ties or great friendships. And I lived alone in my small one-room apartment in a small suburb, on the edge of marginality.

I was never a particularly sociable man. It's not that I was shy, I just preferred to be alone. This did not help my non-existent love life. I also had no addictions such as alcohol or cigarettes, although I rarely indulged in a few drinks at home.

The only thing that brought me solace were my numerous hobbies, in which I occupied my evenings after work and my few days off.

My hobbies were very varied, I liked reading and I still like it, I did wood and stone carving, drawing and painting, clay modeling, I played several small wind instruments and guitar, and at the end I dabbled in electronics, the latter was a bit difficult because I had to dust off my old math notebooks. Anyway, I liked many things but I was not passionate about any of them. So I jumped from one thing to another until I got bored. I was always the apprentice of everything but master of nothing.

Anyway, among my not-so-presumable skills, the only one that was enough to earn me a living was electronics. I wasn't a great expert in it, but it was enough to get me a modest job in a small home technician agency as an electrician, I already knew the basics, so I just had to learn how to use the tools. The pay was low, very low. But I only had myself.

Was my life mediocre and without purpose, maybe. But it was my life. I was almost young, intelligent, healthy and with a future ahead of me. Maybe not a great future, but a normal future was enough for me, I was never ambitious.

Until that day that changed my whole world. Literally.

It was a day like any other, and I remember it with absolute clarity. I was on my way to a customer's house who hadn't paid his bills and his electricity was cut off. I was to reconnect it after he paid them. A simple routine job.

I was on foot, unfortunately I did not possess the necessary job rank to be assigned a vehicle, and my jobs were always in the immediate area. You could say I was the neighborhood electrician. I still remember the heat of the pavement through the soles of my rubber boots.

The sun was shining high in the sky, warming things up more than I would have liked, and there was no wind blowing. Gradual beads of sweat ran down the folds of my face and body in their slow descent, and their path across my skin felt like I had ants on my clothes.

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I was wearing my work uniform, a simple garment of a thick shirt and pants with my name labeled on the chest. The clothes were hideously ugly, but they were insulating. A requirement in this job. Topped off with some insulated gloves. And my old metal toolbox.

It was shortly before noon, there were no people on the streets because the area was a residential sector and most people were already at their workplaces.

Then I fell into a hole that appeared on the ground out of nowhere.

It was not a hole in the pavement, I remember clearly. Nor was it an open manhole, or a crack in the ground caused by gas leaks or seismic movements. In short, it was not a 'normal' hole. It was a totally dark circular hole that suddenly appeared.

There were no magic sparkles, sound effects or fancy sparks like there always are in movies when something magical appears, it just appeared out of nowhere right under my foot. And I fell into it.

And I kept falling... I don't know how long. I felt myself falling, but with the total darkness around me, I might as well have been floating in nothingness. There I lost track of time, it could have been seconds or maybe days.

And then I crashed face first into the ground, my toolbox falling next to me, shaking its contents noisily. It was a painful fall, but bearable. As if I had simply tripped and fallen face first on the floor. My nose was bleeding. But that didn't matter, I was in shock. I stood up suddenly and looked around as if looking for something, or someone, I don't know. My head was just scrambled and everything was very confusing.

I was in a huge room, as big as a hangar. Or was it just hundreds, I never really knew. All in all, it was a very large space. The walls and ceiling seemed to be made of large blocks of rough, solid rock. And there were many small lights hanging from the high ceiling all over the space, emitting a strong white light that illuminated everything brightly.

And all around the room there were hundreds of thick tubes of varying diameters hanging from the ceiling, leaving their open end a few feet above the floor, just above a white-painted circle on the floor. In many of the circles all sorts of monstrous creatures could be seen.

There were huge humans of five meters, tiny humans of half a meter, lions with scales, snakes with wings and horns, some little green bugs that look like garden nomos, a plant thing in the distance, a terrifying creature that looks like one of those predators from the movie, a floating fish, some kind of shadowy humanoid outline, something that couldn't be more than a robot, a fly the size of a cow, and a few things farther away that I couldn't see, except for the twenty-meter tyrannosaurus that sticks out in the background and roars with fury.

But even though all these entities are clearly screaming, kicking, crashing and fussing. They seemed to be confined in an invisible cylinder that prevented them from leaving and even blocked out the noise.

Then I saw a nearby tube light up at the top that connects to the ceiling. And the light descended along the tube as if there was a flashlight inside. When the light reached the bottom, out of the tube came a huge squid that fell right in the middle of a previously empty white circle. Where it was confined like all the others.

Then I looked down at my feet and saw that I myself was confined in one of those circles and above me was one of those tubes spitting monsters. Then I burst into tears.