The hum of the cheap fluorescent bulb over my head usually sounded like the low-frequency drone of existential dread, but this morning, it was just... background noise. I was deep into a Rick and Morty comic the one where Rick accidentally turns a planet's population into sentient corn and I was chuckling, which for me, counts as a vigorous belly laugh. The sheer, beautiful, scientific irreverence of it all.
Then, the world changed.
Not with a flash or a bang. There was no theatrical pop or spatial distortion field visible to the naked eye. One second, I was sitting on my toilet in the sterile white tile of my apartment, the next, the cool ceramic beneath my ass was vibrating with the rumble of diesel engines. The scent of lemon cleaner was violently supplanted by exhaust fumes, stale street grease, and the desperate stench of urban anxiety.
I was in the middle of a major city street. On my toilet. Still mid-wipe.
A wave of scalding, primal heat rushed from my neck to my hairline. It was the sudden, overwhelming sensation of total, exposed humiliation, a visceral, biological reaction that transcended intellect. My cheeks flushed, my stomach clenched, and my every instinct screamed at me to cover myself and disappear into the asphalt. It was the emotional equivalent of an immediate, catastrophic internal failure.
Disgusting.
That primitive, desperate urge to flee, that was the panic reflex, the single-digit IQ response. It was loud, irrational, and completely unacceptable. My 276 IQ flared, not with cold calculation, but with a sudden, brutal assertion of will. I forcibly suppressed the physical response, crushing the adrenaline spike before it could compromise my motor functions or cognitive clarity. The burning heat was shoved down, locked away behind a mental wall that I was already bracing with layers of cynicism and detachment.
The overwhelming feeling was instantly replaced by a wave of profound, magnificent absurdity. It was so aggressively inconvenient, so perfectly timed to maximize public spectacle, that the sheer outrageousness of it became genuinely, scientifically hilarious. This wasn't just random dimensional drift; this was the universe's ultimate, high-concept prank, and I, Ryan Ashford, the guy who sees the fourth wall as a suggestion, was the immaculate, plaid-pajama-clad punchline.
My 276 IQ didn't waste time on pointless questions like, "How did I get here?" or "Where are my clothes?" Those were variables for later. It jumped straight to meta-commentary and immediate threat assessment.
"Oh, you've got to be shitting me," I thought, the irony not lost on me. "I finally get Isekaied, and my dramatic entrance is a statement on the banality of biological needs? Bravo, omnipotent screenwriter. You've managed to integrate the ultimate, inescapable human weakness into the very fabric of my origin story. Five stars for thematic consistency."
A taxi, aggressively yellow and smelling faintly of stale air freshener, slammed on its brakes. The tires screeched in a perfect, desperate pitch of frictional resistance, the bumper stopping about a foot from my pajama-clad knees. My brain instantly calculated the kinetic energy dissipation required to avoid impact, the optimal angle of the skid mark, and the resulting stress fracture probability on the axle.
The driver, a guy whose mustache looked less like facial hair and more like two frustrated squirrels attempting a hostile takeover of his upper lip, leaned out and began screaming a string of unintelligible, probably colorful obscenities in what I analyzed to be a heavy Eastern European accent. His face was the color of a moderately ripened plum, and his jugular vein looked like a fire hose under maximum pressure. My eyes, usually arctic blue chips of calculating ice, simply tracked the movement of his spittle trajectory. The sound was just noise, a highly agitated, low-utility data stream.
The most pressing issue wasn't the five-car pile-up already forming behind the cab, the blaring horns, or the dozens of onlookers fumbling for their phones to capture the viral content of the century. The most pressing issue was task completion.
"Hold your horses, Nietzsche," I muttered to the enraged cabbie, my voice utterly calm, projecting an authority born of total indifference. "Just finishing a thought... and a task."
I completed the wipe with the focus of a nuclear physicist solving a Riemann hypothesis, transforming a moment of profound public indecency into an act of profound private principle. The universe may have violently rearranged reality, but it couldn't interrupt a man's privacy. That's just rude, and I refuse to reward rudeness.
I held up the used paper, examining it briefly. I looked at the toilet bowl. No water, no drainage. The temporal displacement had evidently excised the plumbing integrity from the surrounding infrastructure.
"Well, that's just poor planning," I sighed, dropping the paper in anyway. "Guess the sanitation department in this dimension is going to have some questions about temporal waste disposal. I'll flag it as a potential paradox liability."
I glanced at the Rick and Morty comic still clutched in my free hand. It seemed appropriate. Rick would appreciate the sheer, glorious audacity of the moment. He'd probably use the toilet as a temporal anchor later.
My gaze drifted past the screeching cab driver and the flashing cameras of the assembled mobile phone journalists. That's when I noticed her. A woman in a business suit, her briefcase slipping from her grasp, not screaming in rage or hysterical delight, but standing with a hand clamped over her mouth. Her expression was a mix of genuine worry and deep, flustered confusion. She wasn't processing a prank; she was processing a medical emergency or a tragedy.
She staggered back a step, her eyes wide as she tried to reconcile the image of a handsome young man in pajamas sitting serenely on a toilet in the middle of a six-lane road.
"Oh, my God," she whispered, the sound barely audible over the car horns. "Is he... is he okay? Someone needs to help him. Why is he in a toilet? Was he... was he dumped here?"
I analyzed her tone. Pity. Concern. A low probability of malice. She was the one sane person in the crowd of spectacle-seekers. I decided to reward her sincerity with a personalized explanation.
"Relax, citizen! It's not like I'm doing a number three," I called out, my voice carrying clearly over the din, pitched low enough not to sound like a maniac, but loud enough to be heard. "It's just a guy on a toilet. The most relatable human experience, now brought to you by random dimensional travel. Enjoy the photo op, I'm sure it'll make a great cryptid sighting report."
I stood up, pulling my pajama bottoms (blue plaid, for maximum indignity) into place. My black hair was a mess, tousled from the shock, but I kept my posture ramrod straight—the posture of a king surveying his newly conquered, ridiculously embarrassing territory. The toilet remained, a flawless, bright white ceramic monument to the ultimate "caught with your pants down" moment.
I slid the comic book under my arm. Sirens were howling now, loud and close—the kind of sirens that denote a serious, public disruption. The kind that precede the arrival of men with badges and questions I wasn't remotely interested in answering.
Time to go, my genius brain chirped, now less of an algorithm and more of a deeply sarcastic wingman. We've achieved peak performance art. Now let's disappear before we're forced to explain our origins to a very confused man named Officer Steve.
I casually stepped onto the sidewalk, ignoring the immediate gasps and frantic pointing as people realized I was moving and not a statue. I walked past the worried woman, who recoiled slightly, her eyes still fixated on the toilet.
"Don't worry," I told her sweetly, giving a slight, mocking bow of the head. "I've already cleaned up my act. Unlike your city's traffic infrastructure, which I calculate will take approximately 47 minutes to normalize after the removal of my porcelain throne."
Then, I turned my attention to the cityscape. It looked like a standard Earth, but the architecture was slightly too sleek, the structural steel curves too utopian, and the color palette of the police uniforms was all wrong—a dark blue that wasn't New York's or European standard issue. And that insignia on the side of the incoming police cruiser? A shield design that screamed federally-funded task force rather than local precinct.
The first officer to reach the toilet was a young man, jaw set, looking physically exhausted before he even spoke. He looked at the toilet, looked at the cab driver, then looked at me, the absurdity crushing his will to enforce the law.
"Sir! Freeze! You are under arrest for... for... what is this?" he stammered, pointing a shaky hand at the ceramic fixture.
I gave him a look of profound disappointment. "Officer, focus. The crime here is not the toilet. The crime is the systemic failure to maintain adequate social hygiene in a densely populated urban center. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need a coffee and a briefing on this dimension's socio-economic status. I have a 10 A.M. meeting with the concept of causality."
I didn't wait for his processing unit to reboot. I shifted my weight, calculating the exact density of the crowd between myself and the nearest high-traffic pedestrian avenue. The crowd was currently hyper-focused on the spectacle of the still-standing toilet and the interaction with the first responders. I was, for a precious few seconds, old news.
Using an obscure psychological technique known as The Unflappable Disappearance (basically, acting like you belong where you are going, even if you are in pajamas), I blended. I didn't run. I simply began walking purposefully, my head slightly tilted as if reviewing a document in my mind, the comic book providing a flimsy shield of normalcy. The crowd parted just enough they were expecting a sprint, a confession, a tantrum, anything but the bored, professional gait of a genius on an important errand.
Within three minutes, I was two blocks away, the fading howl of the sirens transforming into a distant, predictable drone. I tucked my hands into the pockets of my plaid pajamas, a profound sense of self-satisfaction settling over me. I had survived a high-level dimensional shift, maintained my dignity, avoided police custody, and left a perfectly baffling piece of physical evidence for the opposition to analyze.
The reality was simple: I was nakedly vulnerable. No money, no identity, no equipment, and most tragically, no coffee. But my greatest asset the sheer processing power and chaotic cynicism of my mind was intact.