“So, you want to hear my story? Well it started with a good old stabbing. The previous wielder was minding his own business, looking pretty wealthy in a poor neighbourhood, when two men tried mugging this man. In hindsight I’m not sure what happened, how he didn’t use the power of the Atlas to put an end to the mugging before it even started. Anyway, upon being stabbed in what I believe was the stomach, our surroundings seemed to almost fade away while a large room seemed to fade in. I now know this to be part of the Atlas’s ability to shift the wielder between their current universe and the Atlas pocket universe.

All four of us were transported. I think it was due to him losing control that he also took me, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think he also shunted the two wannabe muggers out of the pocket universe, as shortly after arriving they disappeared. This left the man and I alone inside the pocket universe, with him seemingly bleeding out. I was petrified, and there was nothing I could do to help him.

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Eventually he bled out, and in doing so his body seemed to break into tiny, barely visible, specs of matter that all floated towards the centre of the room.

You’re probably wondering what this room looks like, now that I think about it. Well it was spherical but with the floor at what was approximately a third of the height of the sphere. The walls were bare and devoid of anything to differentiate one spot from another, lacking even the slightest variation. The dull blue/grey colour added to the insignificant feeling the walls were giving off. The floor itself was a dull silver grating, with indentations in a clockwise spiral with eight lines spaced evenly.

Once my attention was attracted towards the centre though, is where the truly amazing phenomena begin. Above a circular slab of what appears to be quartz that’s about a meter high is what looks like a hologram of the universe. Now that I know what it is, I can say it was actually a simplified map of the local universes, which I still can’t explain properly. Nevertheless, this 3D hologram-esque map contained almost countless small spheres of varying colours and sizes. And this, is the base form of The Atlas."