Chapter Text
. 
It was a matter of which fruit loop sunk first.
In other words, 'Everything was already going wrong. Now it was just a question of what would go wrong first. . ."
You could assume the freakish pink castle that smelled like gingerbread and cream was amongst the first fruit loop to sink because it pulverized your senses. Pink frosting floors, hellfire and high chandeliers. The curiously 2D rat in a dress sitting across from you was probably the second fruit loop. All things considered, it was an all around soggy bowl of cereal.
Obviously not the cereal you were eating. That cereal was actually good, and none of the fruit loops had sunken yet.
"You, 'gamer'!" The mouse. . . beaked. . . pink thing flailed. "Is that one," she pointed at you, and you withered away, "attempting to communicate with their strawberry puffs, or are they meaning to insult my royal kitchen's cooking?"
"1'm 601n6 70 b3 s0 l3g1t w17h y0u dud3. n0 clu3," snotty-fingers replied. Supposedly, he was called 'Infected'. It wasn't much better of a name. It wasn't a name at all actually, and the more you thought about it, the more you denied it.
"Rat's shouldn't wear dresses. . ." You gawked into your bowl. "This can't be happening. This isn't happening. . ." A cloud of sparkles grumbled over the dining table and sneezed glitter into your cereal, insisting that it was, very much indeed, happening.
Your mouth opened a couple of times, fancy spoon mindlessly swishing the milk around to mix the glitter in like it hadn't been there in the first place.
"Bah! They're doing it again!" The princess proclaimed. She stood on her chair, barely making her taller than the table, and threw a finger in your direction. "Infected, do something about your peon! They're doing that thing again. That thing where they start sulking and mumbling and shaking and generally ruining the calming, strawberry-scented mood of my plummy castle!"
"y0, m8!" Infected reached over, and you leaned away. He took no offense, tossing his arm around your chair instead. He cleared his throat with an ear-grating gag and cough. "l1k3, 74k3 4 ch1ll p1ll. 1t'5 r34lly n07 th47 53r10u5."
"The elevator must've dropped twenty stories. . ." You continued to mutter, not listening. "I flattened on impact. This is hell for pancake-ified corpses. Eternity stuck in brunch." Your spoon clicked the bottom of the bowl and the princess-rat-thing rolled her eyes.
"Pish-Posh. This isn't hell. Hell's downstairs, and anyway, the decorating isn't that nice. Certainly more toasty at least, but my castle is substantially more refined. Really! You're in perfectly good hands." She sat back in her chair, the big the pink bow on her head left staring over the table. "And my brunches rarely run past an hour. I'm a very busy princess, you know." Her little hand slapped a knife out of the way to grasp for a plate of sprinkled pop-tarts. "Lots of ruling to do. Lots of baking. Lots of torturing damned souls. Lady-like things."
"I'm a pancake somewhere back on earth. . ."
"They're doing it again. Stop that. Stop that—" The princess picked her scepter off the side of the table and smacked you in the side of the arm with the heart-shaped jewel at the end. You flinched, but she attacked you insistently. "Cease at once your depressing drivel!! You're ruining the tea party with your uncouth mood!"
"h3y, dud3. y0u 60nn4 e4t 7h47?" Infected interrupted, grabbing the side of your cereal bowl and tugging it away. "7h3 fru17 l00p5 4r3 60nn4 51nk 500n." He took the spoon from your hand, mixing and shoveling puffs into his mouth. Milk ran down his chin and Infected shut his eyes, smiling wirily. "7h47'5 d0p3."
No.
No, they definitely had.
The fruit loops had definitely already sunk.
You disassociated for the remainder of brunch.
You also learned that the rat's name was Mozelle. And she was, in fact, not a rat at all. Or anywhere related to the vermin family (though you highly doubted that part). She scolded you more after that fact with her scepter and various pop-tarts. You really didn't know how else to act. You could barely walk to the elevator when brunch concluded.
The princess ended up coming too.
Fanfare and confetti bid you three goodbye, and when the elevator shut, the pistons hissed with a mechanical farewell and the lift moved onward like it had never happened.
You leaned against the wall, releasing a deflated sigh. You couldn't seem to look anywhere but your shoes. Gravity forced itself past you the faster the elevator moved. For such an abnormally sized space, it felt unusually small. Infected in particular didn't seem to understand the concept of personal space, sticking indescribably close without actually touching you.
"1 h4pp3n 70 l1ke 7h3 3l3v470r, y4 kn0w," he commented, rubbing checkered snot off his lips. "1t'5 4c7u4lly pr377y l1t. y0u'll 637 u53d t0 1t."
"Am I to believe this peon of yours isn't already acquainted with the Regretavator?"
"n4hh!!! p1ck3d 7h15 n00b 0ff 4 fl00r 1'v3 n3v3r b33n."
Well, this was awkward.
The feeling one gets from being talked about when they're still present is a little like attending the 'Annual Duck Feeding Committee', but you've never met a duck before (let alone fed one), and all the other ducks in the room can tell and now they're mumbling about it, and you suddenly realize that you're the only member of the committee who isn't a duck.
It's a little like that—in a way.
You rubbed your neck, eyes moving towards the elevator panel in a lame attempt to redirect attention. You wanted to ask if the buttons did anything, but Mozelle and Infected had gotten into a discussion about gaming tournaments, and you really didn't know either of them well enough to interrupt.
Not that you planned to know them.
You exited the conversation and approached the panel to study the buttons. None of them seemed to do anything—nothing you could decipher. You clicked an infinity button. It made a silly sound. That was all. You tried the others, pressing them in random orders, but all they did was glow and beep, and, honestly, you were more cautious to try the others.
Your finger ghosted the happy face.
"What does this button do?" You asked and a shadow loomed over you, leaning around your shoulder to see where you were pointing. Green and purple snot dripped on your arm. "GEE'ZUS—!" You jerked backward, flailing, but Infected didn't notice much to your chagrin.
"0h! n07h1n6." For good measure, he clicked it three times to prove his point, but it turned checkered instead. "0h. . . wh00p5."
He shrugged for his mistake and the elevator rattled to a stop. Smoke entered the vents above your head without warning, and you stumbled backward, watching the doors gape open and allow bigger clouds of smog to slink inside.
"AH! It looks like Mach's floor! Double-Plummy!" Mozelle spoke, scuttling over. "Mm! Smells like death and suffering out there. Reminds me of Dad!"
"WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!" You shouted. "I'm not going out there!!"
As vindictive as you thought it was, the elevator ended up tipping over and shaking you all out like pennies in a piggy bank. You landed on Mozelle and Infected landed on you (nearly making you as two-dimensional as the former).
The room was huge with a wire gate and haphazard pedestals blowing fire to the air. Mozelle was right. It did smell like death. The aroma of sulfur and gasoline was so thick in fact that it felt oily on your skin.
Your head ping-ponged from floor to ceiling. This place was crudely designed... like a torture chamber.
"WHAT THE SH—"
"m4ch d1d 50m3 r3d3c0r471n6!!"
"Hm. You're right," Mozelle observed, turning towards a random far wall to observe offensive blood splatters and charred bones.
There was a figure sitting on a ledge in the distance.
Infected nudged you in the shoulder then and your eyes shifted to glare at him. "h0p3 y0u'r3 600d 4t 0bb1es, n00b@!!" He tilted his head and struck a few stiff stretches. "7h15 i5 50m3 h4rdc0r3 g4m1n6 5k1ll."
"...What?"
You started to pace, tugging strands of your hair and gasping puffs of ill-flavored smoke. The carbon dioxide wasn't leaving your lungs fast enough. "What is—!? What is happening right now!?" Your voice came in a strangled whine. "Thirty minutes ago I was fixing my tie and reorganizing spread sheets for my company's annual progress meeting, and now I'm—!"
A wall of fire burst from behind you three and you whipped around, beholding hell itself.
"0hhh n0!!! h3r3 17 c0m35!!!" Infected exclaimed all too gleefully, spinning and leaping onto the nearest pedestal. Mozelle was the only one who didn't seem the least bit bothered. She fixed her dress and lifted her snout (or beak maybe?) to the air, giving a pompous huff.
"The fire back home is hotter." Waving her hands, she floated upwards in a wisp of sparkles and levitated across the room, leaving you pointedly behind. Pointedly in shock.
You twisted around, watching the wall of fire.
"Dreams can't hurt you," you insisted. "Yeah. No. Of course. It's stupid to think I'll die." You tried very hard to believe that at least as the room got hotter. A groan forced itself from your mouth. You were very upset that none of your backwards thinking was making the smoke in the air nor the tingling of the great wall of fire feel any less realistic. You took staggering steps backward, contemplating how far you must be from the thirty-ninth floor now.
The thirty-ninth floor. The annual progress meeting. Visions of your life from a mere hour ago swam sickeningly through your nauseated mind.
Infected was far behind at this point, tripping awkwardly across spinning pedestals and narrowly missing columns of fire.
You tried to prod at those feelings of delusion clouding your judgment. Strange men with multicolored snot. Talking not-rat's that wore pink dresses. Rude elevator's with infinity symbols. No. You couldn't wrap your head around it.
Weird, long hallways with nosy fake potted palms. Pink castles made of candy, cream, and hellfire. Annual progress meetings you would never attend! Your boss would never see such wonderful spread sheets! Your conscious, stuck down here in a smoke-scented obstacle course from hell—!!
You fell to the floor. It took a minute to get out all your pent-up sobbing before you came back to yourself with a great big blossom of anger swelling in your chest. You leapt to your feet. The fire was close enough to sting your skin, but with those jarring thoughts, you finally grasped it.
You grasped how stupid this all was.
How utterly insane. And strange. And unreasonable. And dangerous it was.
Because, yes!
That's right, you realized.
This was real, and you were about to get every fiber of skin and hair on your body burnt extra crispy.
.