Chapter Text
Your life had become something so monotone and devoid of color that you felt you lived inside one of those old black-and-white soap operas your grandmother would watch. Every day was a blur of minimum wage shifts, every penny you earned would be used for one purpose only: to eventually afford your college tuition and to make your dream of becoming a fashion designer a reality.
The only recent event that painted your gray life a shade of blue had been the sudden passing of your grandmother. The only thing she left behind, memories aside, was a strange and heavy family relic. A beautiful and old pendant you now wear around your neck every single day, not knowing why the absence of its weight on your neck leaves you feeling empty.
To escape your depressing reality, you found comfort in fictional worlds, losing yourself in the storytelling and its characters. You had recently finished watching JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind and had started part 6 already. You had decided to spend the rest of the evening trying to recover from the heartbreaking deaths of your favorite characters.
Now, you were sitting in your bed, bored out of your mind and wearing a casual but stylish outfit, waiting for your roommates to arrive so you could head out to a party.
You didn't even want to go, but next year you would start your senior year of high school, and you wanted to make memories and have fun, for your friends' sake. You packed your essentials into your brown bag: credentials, a credit card, cash, a phone charger, headphones to drown out the overwhelming noise later, and a couple of snacks. On a whim, you slid your sketchbook inside your bag, with a small pencil case you carried everywhere you went. If the party got too loud, you could always find a quiet corner to sketch.
"They’re really taking their sweet time," you muttered to yourself in the empty bedroom.
Thinking you heard footsteps down the hallway, you stood up quickly to finish getting ready. As you did, you adjusted the pendant around your neck, which now felt oddly heavy. Suddenly, a wave of intense and nauseating dizziness hit you. You noticed a small cut on your finger, a single crimson drop of blood falling into the carpet below. But you didn't have time to properly process any of it. Black spots swarmed your vision like an angry cloud of locusts, and your lower limbs went numb.
It's just a head rush. You thought, panicking. I just need to stand still, and it will go away in a few seconds.
But the world around you tilted violently; the universe had other plans in store for you. You reached out to grab something, anything, but your fingers only grasped at air.
Before the pain, you heard the sound. A loud and wet, sickening crack that echoed through your ears as your face collided painfully with the hard floor.
Pain exploded behind your eyes, and when a fraction of consciousness returned to you, you could now feel as if you were pinned on the floor by gravity and agony. Your forehead felt sticky, and you could taste iron in your mouth. Your bag was still looped tightly around your arm, which was bent at an unnatural angle. You couldn't properly see out of one eye, and your vision was bloody and hazy. Your lungs refused to expand, and your limbs refused to cooperate.
You lay there, paralyzed, desperately praying for the sound of the front door opening. To hear the warm laughter of your closest friends, waiting for them to find you and call an ambulance. The pain and panic that were building up in your chest and knotting in your throat were suffocating.
In what felt like the longest three seconds of your life, your memories flashed back to you like a movie film revealing itself from your brain. You could see it all, your dreams, your future, your unfinished ideas, your memories, your friends. All stripped away by a clumsy and pathetic accident….accident?
Is this what they'll write on my grave? She stood up too fast and died?
It was a ridiculous and humiliating way to go; you couldn't even die with your dignity intact. In your final fading thoughts, a bizarre wave of grief hit you, something so ridiculously human that it seemed dumb even to believe.
I won't be able to finish watching Jojo's Bizarre Adventure with my friends anymore.
As the light completely left your eyes, you fell into a deep and silent slumber, from which you would never awake.
When your eyes snapped open, all the pain was gone, and in its stead was a cold detachment. You were looking down at your own corpse. It was a gruesome sight. You lay twisted on the floor, hand still clutching the bag, the pendant coiled tightly around your neck, like a pithon choking you. The gash on your forehead was deep and jagged. A single tooth lay a few feet away from the bloodstained carpet. You looked like the victim of some violent homicide, but the truth was by far more embarrassing. You stare at your glossy eyes, filled with blood from a broken blood vessel; you couldn't believe they once held life in them before.
Wait…if I'm dead, how am I looking at myself?
You looked down at where your hand should have been, but found nothing. It seemed like you had become a shifting and ethereal yellow gas cloud, reminiscent of a soul leaving its vessel behind. Below you, the family relic lay beside your corpse's chest, having separated from the pendant's chain upon impact. It was broken, but you could see there was a small opening, revealing a secret compartment you had never noticed before.
Driven by a strange and otherworldly pull, your vapor-like hand reached down and touched the relic, and then, the world instantly turned inside out.
A clap of thunder cracked so loud you felt it would have burst your non-existent eardrums. It was as if a vacuum had grabbed onto your soul, pulling you into the tiny compartment of the pendant with a soft, final click.
What followed was a horrific, stunning, and Lovecraftian sight as you descended through space and time. You were being violently dragged through the wrinkles of the multiverse. You saw yourself reflected a thousand times in a fractured mirror of different realities: you could see yourself as a 3D model, a 2D drawing, a stop motion puppet, and other strange cosmic anomalies. Mouth agape, you tried to scream, but the vacuum swallowed your screams and tears.
Suddenly, horrific heat surged through your ghost of a body. Like a film played in reverse, atoms began to collide and merge, looking down on your form, bone, marrow, veins, tissue, muscle, and skin rapidly built themselves back up. Together they created a stronger, taller, denser, and noticeably athletic body, similar to your own, but was by far more exaggerated. With a final violent jolt, you were spat out of the cosmic rift, briefly flying through the air until you slammed hard against a solid brick wall.