I don't remember how long I've been here. There's only darkness—and silence so complete it presses on me like a second skin.
When I first woke, I thought I was in a dream. My body—if that word still applies—was a small sphere of light adrift in an endless abyss. No ground, no sky, no heartbeat. Just black.
I could move, but every direction was the same.If there's a map of this place, it's one word repeated forever: nowhere.
How did I get here? Pretty sure I died.
The last memories I have: a cold cup of coffee, Project Ascension flickering on my monitor, the modded WoW server that had recently taken all my extra time. I remember an alert ping in Discord, a goofy meme, and then something like a crack inside the world.
A bang? A snap?The sound was wrong—too big for the room. The screen blazed white and then—
Nothing.
I guess that was it. Game over.
I wasn't anyone special. Thirty-three. Normal nine-to-five. Two small dogs—Bella, a bossy little gremlin who believed she owned the couch, and Snickers, who believed he was a cat and gravity was optional.
Oh God, my dogs. Who's feeding them? Did my parents find them? Did they sit by the door waiting for footsteps that didn't come?
It hurts to think about.It hurts more not to.
Hope is expensive in the dark.
Time doesn't behave here. It stretches like gum, snaps back, sticks to itself. I tried counting seconds at first, mouthing numbers I couldn't hear. One to sixty. Sixty to thirty-six hundred. Thirty-six hundred to—
I gave up.
Without sunrise or heartbeat, time is just a story you tell yourself until you get bored with the plot.
I tried moving, too. "Swimming" feels wrong; there's no water. "Flying" assumes air. I pushed my glow in a straight line for as long as I could stand, the way you keep walking in a dream because stopping means admitting you're lost.
Nothing changed.
I might have traced a perfect circle or a figure eight, or the largest square in creation. The dark did not care.
Eventually, I stopped. You'd think stillness would be scarier than motion. It isn't. It's just honest. I anchored myself to nothing and floated there, watching my own light spill out and get swallowed by the void.
Silence makes you talkative. I started narrating my day to the dark like a YouTuber with zero viewers.
"Welcome back to my channel. Today we'll be doing absolutely nothing."
I named a speck of dust—or an illusion I created—Wilson, because apparently my brain collects clichés as a hobby.
I told Wilson about my best friend's wedding, where the DJ played Despacito what seemed like fifty times.
I told him about the time Snickers stole a slice of pizza twice his size and dragged it under the couch, staring at me like we were negotiating a hostage situation.
I told him the story of me being average and content and then, suddenly, here in the dark.
You can only talk to a speck of dust so long before forgetting larger things.
Not at once. Memory erodes like a coastline—first a handful of sand, then a lip of earth, then half the yard is gone and you're muttering about insurance.
I lost birthdays.I lost office gossip that was never interesting to begin with.I lost the shape of my apartment.I lost the route to the park, the color of the sky on autumn evenings, and the names of people I'd promised to remember forever.
I held on to a few things. Bella and Snickers. My parents—not their faces, but the feeling of hands that never dropped me. A handful of TV shows and dumb movie quotes. The comfort I found in code—loops and logic, puzzle pieces clicking.
Those stayed. Everything else drifted out with the tide.
I don't know how long I floated like that. I stopped pretending to count. I slept, maybe. I dreamed of walking through a house where every door opened into the same room. I woke up in the same room.
Then it happened.
At first, I thought it was a trick of my own light. A shiver ran through the dark like someone had brushed a finger across a still pond.
A ripple.
I felt it before I saw it—the way you feel bass through your ribs at a concert. The void quivered, and a thin seam of brightness split the black.
Not my glow. Something else. Someone else.
I moved toward it without thinking. Hope is expensive, sure. But when you've been broke forever, even a penny on the sidewalk looks like treasure.
The seam widened. Light bled through in a slow, steady pour, and a presence unfolded—vast and patient—not so much entering the space as reminding it what presence could be.
It wasn't a figure at first, more like a sense of scale, the way standing on a cliff makes your body remember gravity.
Then a shape coalesced from radiance: tall, faceless, edged in a thousand colors I didn't know names for.
A voice came with it. Not loud. Not even sound, exactly. More like thunder remembered by the bones.
"You are… unusual."
The words slid through me, vibrating the edges of my light. If sound had fingerprints, they would have been old and calm and somehow amused.
"You should not be here."
Something shifted in the void with a flick of its hand—if it was a hand—and a count appeared, not written but undeniable. A duration pressed into my mind the way a bruise reminds you where you hit.
"Four thousand years," the voice said.
I tried to answer and was startled at the sound of myself.
"Four thousand—what? You're telling me I've been stuck here for four thousand years?"
The being's attention had weight. I couldn't see eyes, but I felt looked at. Kindness, or curiosity. Maybe both.
"You were meant to be reincarnated after your death," the voice said. "You slipped through the cracks. A clerical error on a cosmic scale."
I let out a laugh that had too many edges. "Cool. I died, then I got lost in the universe's paperwork."
"Do not fear," he said, and something like humor warmed the words. "You have endured long enough. I will grant you a new beginning. Because of this error you will be given three perks. They will be advantages to ease the path—chosen not by preference, but by chance."
I wanted a thousand questions: Who are you? Why me? What world? What rules? What about Bella and Snickers? What about my parents?
But the truth came with a tiredness I hadn't noticed until hope walked in the room. I was too worn out to argue with kindness.
"Okay," I said. The word was small, and it was everything I had.
Three circles of light spun into being between us, floating side by side. Roulettes. Their rims were etched with symbols and words I half-recognized—bits of languages, sigils, titles from anime and movies and myths, the private icons of a life spent hoarding stories. Colors flared through the spokes, bright enough to ache.
"The first," the being said, and the leftmost wheel began to turn.
I watched the words start to blend. The wheel slowed. Clicked. Stopped.
Marvel — Reed RichardsIQ: A mind beyond human measure, the being intoned.
A door I hadn't known existed swung open in me. Not a flood—floods are messy. Memory didn't just return; it arranged itself, filed, and cross-referenced. I could feel patterns connecting like magnets, a soft hum of comprehension behind everything.
If my brain had been a decent PC, someone had just swapped the processor for something you couldn't buy in a store and installed a library that indexed itself.
I gasped. Or did the glowing equivalent.
"The second," the voice said, and the middle wheel spun, shedding motes like sparks. When it stopped—
Marvel — Super Soldier Serum (Perfect)
This time the change moved through me like a tremor, a calibration. Balance tuned. Reflexes wound tight and ready. Strength not as bulk but as efficiency. My senses sharpened past what I'd thought normal.
If I'd had eyes, I could have counted dust.
"Peak conditioning," the being said. "Muscles and reflexes honed to the utmost of what your kind may achieve."
"And the third," he said.
The rightmost wheel spun fast. The symbols on this one were smaller—dense with meaning—tools and hands, instruments and scripts, flavors and forms. It slowed, wobbled, and clicked into place.
I was curious if I was going to hit the Marvel trifecta, but when the wheel stopped it wasn't meant to be.
However… I wasn't mad.
"The Craft," the being paused, and I could swear he almost chuckled.
"Culinary Genius.The touch of Joichiro Yukihira."
I blinked. "So… genius brain, perfect body, and I can cook."
"A curious mix," the voice agreed, warm with amusement. "But fitting. The world you will enter is a blend of your favorites—bright minds, broken hearts, stubborn problems that yield to patience. You will walk among the brilliant and the wounded. Sometimes beside them. Sometimes against."
I thought about knives flashing, pans singing, the clean logic of a recipe that allowed for improvisation—a program you could taste. I thought about memory so sharp it could catalogue the exact pattern of a spice on the tongue, hands precise enough to turn repetition into art.
"That doesn't sound like the worst way to be alive," I said.
"No," the being said, and there was something like approval in the word. "It does not."
The void around us changed. The dark grew thinner, as if light were soaking in from behind it. Threads of brightness stitched themselves through the black. I felt the beginning of gravity—or memory of it—the mind's anticipation of weight.
"You will be born in East Texas," the being said. "Into a family of stubborn minds and open hands. Make this life count."
"What about—?" I started, and the question was too big for one sentence. My parents. My dogs. The long dark. Did any of it matter now? I didn't know.
"You will keep what you have kept," the being said gently, answering a question I hadn't formed. "Fragments, yes. But more than most after such a wait. Strange. You interest me."
"Not sure if that's comforting," I said.
"It is intended to be," the voice said, almost wry. Then: "One more thing."
"The world you enter has no superpowers," the being said. "No capes. No magic spells. Only ordinary people living their lives."
He reached toward me, and the space between us folded like paper.
"Hey," I said, suddenly terrified of forgetting again—of doors closing, of waking with nothing but a blank page. "Will I—will I still be me?"
"Yes," the voice said, firm as bedrock. "You will be you. New and old both. That is what living means."
Something like a laugh rumbled through the dark, warm and distant.
"Enjoy yourself."
The light surged. My small glow blew apart into a thousand motes, and I was falling without distance—not down or up but toward.
A heartbeat.
It shocked me how loud it was. Not mine, not yet. The bass drum of existence, a steady boom that had waited patiently for me to come back around.
The long dark receded like a nightmare your body decides not to keep.
"Hello every one I would like to stat that this is my first time writing a story so there my be some mistakes but all in all I hope you enjoy the story"
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