“Wait… what do you mean your pantry is missing?” I prompted Warren, who gave me a usual blank look.

“Have you not lost your pantry for a time since moving in?” Warren asked flatly.

“No….”

“Oh… Well, you probably just didn’t notice it. It’s a side effect of the building,” Warren responded.

I was still utterly confused. My pantry was little more than a small closet with built-in narrow shelves. Except for it being attached to the kitchen, it might have ended up a decent place to store clothes.

I could lie and say that I do a lot of my own cooking, but it just wouldn’t be true. I cook when I feel like it, but hey, cooking for yourself gets really boring really fast. Not to mention - Warren and Lucy tend to do a lot more cooking and usually about 100x better than I can fry up some eggs (and with about half the mess too).

I walked over to the door to Warren’s pantry and pulled open the door. What was beyond was very clearly not a pantry, but even attempting to describe it would fail to do it justice.

I will attempt it anyway, since it’s important.

It was like seeing into forever. Points of light swirling in a kind of hazy multihued nebula. And the more you looked in any one direction, the more you saw. Everything within appeared to be moving, but not fast enough to see, at least not without concentrated watching. Like clouds on a slow day, I could just make out the scant shift of the lights and the rays which seemed to bend and twist through the haze, illuminating and obscuring at the same time.

Beyond the doorframe was all of this. The floor simply stopped. No ragged edges, but looking more as though the sharpest cutting tool ever dreamed up had simply sliced the pantry from the apartment, leaving a chasm into some other realm.

I started to reach out a hand towards this other realm and found my arm caught by Warren. I looked at him questioning, tearing my eyes away from the view.

“Don’t,” was all he said.

It was enough, but at the same time I needed to know more, no… not more, I needed to know everything.

I stumbled back to the armchair I had been occupying, my mind a jumbled vortex filled with what I’d just seen.

“What did you see?” Warren asked, breaking into my thoughts.

“What? Oh, I guess like a… nebula except… more… stuff,” I said, words failing me.

“Interesting. I wonder if that’s because you’re a baseline or if because you’re a seer,” Warren commented, still in that same flat tone.

I looked up at him as he closed the door to the pantry and came back to the other armchair with a fresh beer in his hand. I glanced at the other one of his. It was already empty.

“Why? What do you or Lucy see?” I asked.

“Darkness. A void of the deepest dark. Utter nothingness,” he said, in the tones of a practiced philosopher.

I pondered this a moment.

“What do you think it means or represents?” I asked.

He blinked and looked at me.

“I think it represents that my pantry is gone and won’t be back for three days,” he said, flatly.

“But why does it happen? Where does it go? What’s the difference between inky blackness and a nebula so filled with details that it might as well be real?” I asked aloud, not expecting any real answers.

Warren was silent, aside from sipping his beer.

Lucy took this opportunity to pop over, looking her usual bright and bubbly self.

“What’s going on with you boys?” she chimed.

“Well, I took my garbage out and ran into Warren’s fiance’,” I managed to get out before Warren could interject otherwise.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Oh… her,” Lucy’s face crumpled like an empty beer can in a Marine’s hand, but only momentarily. “Well, we can’t all have nice days. What else is cooking?”

“Not Warren. His pantry is missing,” I promptly said, much to Warren’s minute scowl.

“Is it that time again? Huh, well, I’ll look for mine to go missing next week sometime then,” Lucy said, flopping down on the hardwood floor with all the grace of a hippo doing the samba.

“So this happens to everyone? We all lose our pantries for a few days every so often and have it replaced some… other realm?” I was incredulous.

Lucy looked at Warren confused.

“He claims it looks like we’re in a nebula instead of the void that you and I see,” Warren said flatly, before draining the rest of his beer.

“Is that a seer thing or a baseline thing?” Lucy asked, looking between us.

“Got me. All I know is that I could stare into it forever,” I said.

“And will try to walk into it before long as well, if I had to guess,” Warren commented.

“Alright, fair. But if you could see if, you might try to reach out and touch it too,” I responded.

We all sat for a few moments in silence, the only sound being the antique grandfather clock that Warren had off to one side.

“On the subject of strange building things, what happens to the trash? I know we don’t get trash pick-up here,” I queried before taking another swig from my beer, still my first since earlier.

“I don’t actually know. I think the artifact takes care of it,” Lucy said, her face uncrumpled by this point.

“Where is this artifact that I’ve heard so much about?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s right next to the trash room,” Lucy said and sprang to her feet as though propelled by springs. “I can show you.”

Obediently, I finished my beer and followed Lucy down the stairs, Warren waving us onward.

When we reached the basement, we moved past the room marked “TRASH” to a door that was unmarked. The door opened at a touch and inside a rather bare looking room was a small pedestal with a curious looking vase. Even before I entered the room, I could see some of the inscribed runes.

“Celestial?” I wondered aloud.

“Close. It’s a derivative of celestial runes, but I’m surprised you knew that,” Lucy said, walking up to it.

“I may have played around with using some of the different rune scripts for secret messages as a kid,” I admitted, stepping up beside her, but definitely avoiding her gaze.

The vase up close didn’t look like much aside from the runes, which seemed to glow slightly less than they did on my Wiznet modem.

“I was honestly expecting something more…” I was at a loss for words again.

“Eldritch? Supernatural? Mind-warping?” Lucy prompted with a slight giggle.

“In truth, yes. Not plain like Dead Space, but also not a 4-D object that hurts to even look at either,” I shrugged.

“Nope. Just a weird looking vase on a perfectly smooth pedestal top,” Lucy said. “Try to pick it up.”

I looked at her.

“Won’t that break the binding to the building?” I asked, more than a little hesitant.

“Nope. Something about the binding anchors the artifact unless you break the binding first so you can move it,” Lucy said, rather assuredly.

“Ok, but if I get into trouble on this, so will you,” I said, shaking a finger at Lucy, who stuck out her tongue at me.

I put a hand on either side of the vase’s base and lifted. It didn’t so much as budge. It was like trying to move stone pillar.

“See? Told you,” Lucy smirked.

“Yeah yeah,” I replied and slid my hands back along the surface unintentionally. “Wait…”

“What?”

“You said perfectly smooth surface, right?” I asked.

“That’s what they said. Otherwise it doesn’t work right,” Lucy said.

“They?”

“The Installation Wizards,” Lucy said.

“You’re kidding,” I wanted to eyeroll so badly, but I couldn’t do that to Lucy.

“No, that’s what they’re called,” Lucy looked a bit puzzled. “Computer thing?”

“Computer thing,” I responded.

“Anyway, what makes you ask?” Lucy prompted.

“It’s not perfectly smooth. I can feel it,” I said, running my fingertips just the barest over the top of the pillar again, next to the vase. “Feels… just barely scratched.”

Lucy and I got down close and looked, even breaking out our cell phones for extra light. Lucy tried feeling the same section.

“Are you sure? I can’t see or feel anything,” she said.

“Baseline sense of touch is pretty sharp,” I said, running my fingers over the scratches over and over.

“Guess I never noticed,” Lucy said.

“Oy… what are you two doing in here?” came a voice.

Lucy and I looked over and it was the super, the old man I met when I first came here.

“Sam hadn’t seen the artifact so I thought I’d show him,” Lucy raised herself to her full height.

“Nothing much to see. It works,” the super said, leaning on his cane.

“I think there might be some scratching on the pillar. It’s not the perfectly smooth that Lucy says it’s supposed to be,” I prompted.

The super looked at Lucy, me, and the vase in that order.

“I suppose it’s possible, but how might you know that?” the old man eyed me suspiciously.

I held up a hand and wiggled my fingers.

“I felt it,” I said, feeling ridiculous even saying it.

The super seemed to consider this.

“Sounds like a baseline thing, but worth looking into,” he said. “Now out, out. I know you’ve got places to be in other than my cellar.”

“By the way, what happens to the trash?” I asked as we stepped outside the artifact room and the super shut the door.

“Atomized and sent to a pocket dimension,” the super said, as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

“Doesn’t that cause mass retention issues in this dimension?” Lucy asked.

“Nah. We empty it now and again. If you look it the right way, it's supposed to be fairly pretty. Like big clouds,” the super said, still clearly shooing us upstairs.

And it was at that point that I figured out that the nebula that I thought I was seeing was in fact a great big pile of garbage. And neither the super nor Lucy could get me to stop laughing for a solid five minutes at the irony.