Chapter 2: Chapter 2: Anomalous Discoveries

As I begin to venture further past the door that separated the hall I first arrived in and the series of rooms I can currently see, I begin to feel a bit strange. Well, stranger than I was just feeling in the wake of the discovery that I am no longer physically disabled.

I make my way towards the room that I was eyeing when I first entered this section of whatever weird space I am now in. As I walk I grow more and more attuned to my enhanced senses, which is something that I am grateful for, even if the current purpose of my enhanced senses is primarily to illustrate just how strange this place is.

I can hear the sound of distant dripping, as if there’s a leak somewhere in the distance, and I am deeply aware of the perpetual humming of fluorescent lights, even after I worked to dull my perception of their constant humming. My enhanced eyesight only allows me to really take in how identical these rooms are, and how damaged some of the stuff is. There are holes all over the walls, holes which at a glance seem to have come from rodents and bugs even if I can’t see any in this particular room.

Curiously some of the ways my senses evolve are a bit more distinct and useful, such as my sense of touch. It takes me a second but before I even reach the room I am heading towards I gain an exact awareness of my kinesthetic territory: my range of motion and in this context the exact amount of space I can control at any given time.

This manifests in my mind’s eye as a sort of layer or bubble that always surrounds me and reacts to my motions. When I move I am innately aware of how the bubble adjusts to my movements, which allows me to feel somewhat more safe as I make my way into the room I am heading into.

I walk through an empty doorframe and find myself in a room that is nearly identical to the one I was just in. As I do I commit to the method I used to get here: just head north. The room that I am now in only has one difference from the room I was just in: there is no actual door leading in and out of this room, just a number of empty doorframes.

I take a second to mentally examine my senses to see if there are any other, less obvious differences between this room and other ones. I don’t detect any immediate differences and I continue walking without slowing down or even really turning in any discernible way.

This room is, in all likelihood, one of hundreds or even thousands of visually identical rooms and I don’t plan to waste my time. I’ve got twelve “levels” to explore, and if it’s true that I’ll grow stronger with each level I successfully get through then that means I’m weaker right now than I’ll be for the rest of my life. That means that I am in danger, because something about this place is causing the hairs on my arms to stick up. I want to get out of here as quickly as possible.

I make my way to the entrance to the next room and I dart through it without any ceremony. In this room the doors are positioned slightly to the left of where they were in the last room, but that itself is not enough to particularly alarm me. If anything, my ability to notice such a minute detail without purposefully trying to investigate the room is proof of how much sharper my senses are now than they were before.

I continue my march deeper and deeper into this weird space, my only entertainment being the sounds of my own thoughts. The next rooms are much of the same, weird square yellow spaces with numerous empty doorframes that invite me “deeper” into wherever the hell I am, as well as all sorts of holes that hint at the damages, however minor, that this place has suffered over time.

I don’t even have any actual confirmation that I’m going “deeper” into this place, or otherwise moving in a real direction towards… something, I can only assume that I am. It manages to be both maddening and deeply annoying. Before long it is beginning to stress me out since it makes it easy to feel like I haven’t made any progress at all in the time since I’ve begun to explore these rooms.

The first real event of note happens after I begin to see, firsthand, just how identical the rooms are. I enter the twenty-fifth room I have decided to investigate and I quickly opt to take a break, feeling like I’ve earned one since I began to walk many minutes ago. So I walk over to one of the walls where there are less doors than along some other ends of the room and plan to use one of the walls to prop myself up.

The instant that I put my back on the wall, the first time I’ve touched anything since I first opened the door leading into this area, I feel something… strange happen inside of me. I gain a sudden, sharp awareness of a subtle well of energy that exists inside of me, near my heart. It is almost like a sort of second stomach, but it’s not filled with food.

I am unsure of the precise mechanics of how this works but I can keenly feel some of this energy flow from near my heart to the very edge of my back and then out of me, into the wall I had just begun to touch. The energy enters the wall and I feel a sort of secondary mental theater appear within my mind’s eye, splitting up my vision like I’m playing a split screen video game with a friend. One mental theater is what my eyes see, and the other is of the area in front of the wall I am leaning against.

I freeze up as this occurs, slumping against the wall where my energy is going and as it happens I feel the energy inside of my odd secondary stomach nearly completely deplete. The feeling is weirdly draining, and I find myself momentarily struggling to stay awake as it occurs, but I manage to power through it and reach into my backpack. Even without looking inside the backpack I can find one of the crates that contain the almond water bottles and I ungracefully grab one of the bottles.

I yank it out of the backpack and I twist the lid off before I begin to slowly drink the water. I am initially put off by the taste, which reminds me of vanilla-flavored water, but I power through my initial surprise and continue to slowly down the stuff.

As I drink the fluid contained in my bottle I begin to feel the energy within my… second stomach replenish itself, and I begin to feel a bit of the stress that was steadily accumulating in the back of my mind slowly dissipate. I even feel the size of my second stomach expanding! The sensations that accompany this unexpected growth are a bit like what I imagine it feels like right when someone grows taller, a bit uncomfortable, but I’m also glad it’ll be a bit harder for me to completely exhaust myself in the future.

Before long the bottle is empty. I study the empty bottle for a second and let out a hearty chuckle as I feel surprisingly replenished. During the time I was drinking the water enough of my energy was restored that I unintentionally poured energy into the bottle, but even that energy has since been replenished.

It seems that anything I touch, other than perhaps my clothes and my backpack for reasons I don’t understand, greedily sucks in this energy… I also now have a new mental theater I can look through: that of the glass bottle in my hands. Fortunately, this theater vanishes when I put the bottle back in my backpack, opting to continue to keep the object, for now at least.

“How weird…” I mutter, even as I momentarily focus on the wall’s mental theater. I get up, using the wall behind me for support, and I watch myself stand up. I can’t see my face if I use this mental theater, but I decide to change that by turning around and I am delighted to see that even my face was not spared the effects of the warrior-like transformation I underwent.

My face is slimmer and more angular than it was before. My facial features are sharper than they were before, such as my enhanced jawline which I can tell I could use to cut glass if I wanted. The features are all impressive, and I allow myself a beat to admire my new looks. I then smirk at myself, really liking my new looks, before I take a beat to actually study the wall.

I focus on the wall for the first time since my energy seeped into it. As I focus I feel my awareness of the wall expanding almost like if a normal person focused on their senses and actively investigated something rather than just casually perceiving it. I can keenly sense what is going on around a small portion of the wall where my energy infected the object, like how someone can feel things they are touching and some of the vibrations that touch the things they are touching.

My active attention allows me to learn a lot about the wall my energy is infecting. I can sense the small lifeforms, like spiders and rats, that infest the walls of this place. Some of them even live in the wall I have infected with my energy!

I experiment with my energy, aware that it is almost like touching something and order the stuff to surge towards the parts of wall that are infected by small animals. I smile as I feel the energy do as I command, while subtly changing what I can see in my secondary mental theater. The energy races from the part of the wall that I had touched. The invisible stuff speeds towards an oblivious roach, and the only reason I can see it is because of the split-screen mental theater I can now look through allows me to see inside of the wall so long as I want to do so.

The energy I put into the wall, however unwilling and unwitting it was, is not very much. Because of this I am pleasantly surprised when the energy manages to reach the roach and animates the portions of the wall around the critter, trapping it abruptly. I didn’t command the energy to do that, it just did it on its own! A second later the portions of the wall that trapped the insect turn into gross tendrils and thin needles that hold the roach still and then pierce its tiny body.

I watch the corruption in the wall move into the insect and as it does it solidifies in the thing’s heart rather than spreading throughout its entire body. I lose my connection to the wall, and shudder as I feel that particular mental theater winks out of existence, but in exchange for losing one mental theater I gain another: that of the cockroach!

What’s more I can feel a true connection to the living creature form in the back of my mind. I can feel our minds connecting and a small bridge forming that allows me to communicate with the critter, even if it can’t quite communicate back. Not only that, but I feel my energy concentrating itself in the tiny insect’s heart and forming a… seed, of sorts. I quickly hypothesize that this must be the difference between my energy filling an inanimate object and a living creature? If so, how incredibly powerful…

The seed within the insect begins to beat within a few moments, and as it does my eyes widen. I feel the seed within the cockroach producing more of the energy that initially invaded it, almost as if the energy belongs to the insect instead of belonging to me. Despite this I can still easily control the energy, and I begin to smirk as I attempt to control the insect and watch as the thing effortlessly does as I mentally command.

“There’s potential here…” I remark, as I practice commanding the insect for a few moments. The creature’s senses are decently powerful things and I allow myself a moment to grow used to them, as well as to what passes for “thoughts” from the creature, which mostly boil down to instinctual “observations” about its surroundings and feelings. When I am satisfied with what has happened here I smirk and silently begin to head towards the next room.

I make it to the next room and enter yet another almost exact match of the last twenty five rooms. I study the place as I march through it, grateful that a new event happened in the last room which interrupted the monotony of the last two dozen rooms. Stress had been accumulating in the back of my mind and if not for my break I definitely think I’d have snapped eventually.

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This room, while as near an exact match to the other two dozen rooms I’ve explored, is a bit closer to the source of the constant dripping that I’ve been able to hear for the last hour. The sound of dripping is now a touch louder than it was before, and actually hearing it be just a bit louder than before is enough to make me curious about what must be causing it. I assume it must be a leak of some sort, but I do wonder if it’s water that’s dripping, or something else.

I make it to the edge of the room and listen as the sound I am tracking continues to get subtly louder. I tap the wall next to me as I exit the room and enter the next one, and I smirk when I feel a bit of my supernatural energy exit my hand and enter the wall. This time I am able to pull my hand away, since I did this on purpose, and so I only lose a fraction of the energy I lost earlier. I close my eyes and relax as I feel a new mental theater appearing in my mind’s eye, this one dedicated to the wall next to me.

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The transformed “human”, unaware of the terrifying extent of the changes that have occurred to him, resumes making his way further into the first level of The Backrooms. Armed with, at best, a child’s understanding of the remarkable modifications to his physiology, he begins to delve deeper into the unnatural dimension he was thrown into earlier today.

The figure takes close to forty-five minutes exploring room after room as well as infecting wall after wall with his supernatural energy before he finds himself close to the room where the dripping sounds come from. When he is just a few rooms away his enhanced senses pick up softer sounds coming from the same room he is heading towards… Specifically, he can hear the quiet noises made by animals drinking something.

This causes the man to slow down and to consider his approach more carefully than he has been until now, as he has not yet encountered anything that could fight him since he first entered The Backrooms. He continues moving, but more deliberately now, rather than aimlessly wandering while depending on his sharp senses for protection.

A small part of him is actually excited to be on the verge of encountering something else, but he can intuitively sense how weird this dimension is, even if he lacks the vocabulary needed to consciously express that. That subconscious knowledge compels him to be careful, and has a noticeable but subtle effect on his actions.

He heads towards the wall closest to the door that will lead him into the room next to the room where the sounds are coming from and he touches the wall. At this point the creature’s internal stores of supernatural energy are much higher than they were initially and so he easily infuses the object with his powerful will.

He keeps his hand on the object for a few moments before lifting it off. It takes him a second to adjust to the newest mental theater to fill his mind’s eye and when he’s done adjusting to the presence of yet another avenue through which he can see the world he commands the energy to scout ahead for him. The energy responds to his intentions and it surges towards the other side of the wall it has infected.

The figure cleverly uses this extremely unusual supernatural power and he silently pilots the energy along the walls of the next room. The stuff surges through the wall, unobstructed and undistracted by any of the small lifeforms that Gustavo would normally command it to attack. It manages to reach the door that leads into the room where the dripping is coming from and as it does the teenager commands the stuff to seep into the floor.

The floor is promptly infected by the sickly corruption the young jumper controls. This expands his senses and allows him to quickly see a bizarre sight: a trio of dogs are lapping at a depression in this particular room’s floor where a pool of wine-colored fluid has been collecting for an unknown amount of time.

The wine-colored fluid steadily drips from the ceiling and must have been collecting in the depression for some time. The dogs, large beasts with fur the color of a starless night sky, thirstily lap at the fluids and are growing noticeably larger as they slake their thirst.

Curiosity compels the figure to try and infect the hounds with his energy, and he orders the supernatural essence to try and enter one of the dogs, only to be surprised when the stuff is rebuffed completely and the hound he tried to infect stops drinking the weird fluid and turns in the direction of the young man. The dog doesn’t dart towards the figure, but it does begin to bark loudly.

Gustavo himself winces when he realizes that he’s alerted the dog to his presence, somehow. None of the other dogs react to this change in behavior, but Gustavo does not hesitate. He pulls open his backpack and pulls out one of the weapons in the thing: a small gun.

His energy seeps into the thing and completely fills it within the time it takes his heart to beat. He quietly focuses the energy in the gun and wills it to condense into a seed capable of producing more of the transformative energy he himself produces.

He moves forward, and keeps his supernatural attention focused on the hound. The dog moves in such a way that it indicates that the dog is aware of Gustavo’s presence and location, and Gustavo hisses in annoyance as he realizes that.

“Fuck…” He snarls, though he doesn’t move towards the dog itself. He enters the room next to the one where the wine-colored fluid has been pooling for some time, and he intends to dart through the room, but as soon as he enters the place his skin begins to bubble, and he feels eerie instincts screaming at him. A small part of him wants to fight the creature, but he fights against those instincts, unsure of how to defend himself in what is basically a whole new body.

He manages to ignore his instincts and begins to dart across the room towards another door, but as soon as he darts forward the dog stops barking at him and lunges, sprinting out of the room it is in and entering the room the “human” is in almost before Gustavo has taken as many as three sprinting steps. The dog is incredibly, impossibly fast and the only thing that allows Gustavo to react in time are his own enhanced, impossible instincts, as well as the fear he feels as he senses the enormous beast darting towards him.

As the dog dashes towards him the figure unconsciously points his gun in its direction and fires the thing. A single bullet, corrupted by the energy that infuses the gun, explodes out of the object and the dog is too stupid to understand the threat the bullet poses. The thing does not hit the dog’s head, but it does slam into one of its muscled legs, ripping through the limb and causing blood to explode outward. The bullet would normally fail to damage the beast, but the energy infusing it has tremendously empowered the thing and allows even the low-caliber bullet to rip through the fur, skin, and musculature of the monster that had been hunting the wanderer.

The dog trips as a result of the blow and begins to slide across the floor towards the warrior. The thing is now a helpless tangle of uncoordinated limbs thrashing about, and it is howling in pain. The smell of its blood causes Gustavo to turn and look at the damaged beast. The gigantic hound must be close to five feet tall and is even longer than that, and even in its damaged state Gustavo can see the beast’s tremendous muscles. This causes the eerie warrior to slow down, as powerful, alien instincts fill him.

Adrenaline is pumping through him and he turns, mid-stride. He moves towards the creature, ignoring the thing’s howls of pain as his empowered flesh fills his mind with powerful and strange urges. When he reaches the beast he reaches out a single limb and touches the wounded animal, which causes the creature to emit a fearful howl as it’s fur, skin, and muscles begin to be torn off and absorbed by the newest eldritch monster to enter The Backrooms.

The warrior begins the process of absorbing the fur, muscles, and skin of the wounded monster. The creature continues to howl, and then whimper, in pain as portions of its body are absorbed by the stray explorer who was sucked into this place without his consent.

Fur, skin, and muscle is torn off of the beast and flows into the hand of the eldritch creature the hound dared to assault before vanishing completely. For the next few moments the hound suffers immensely, before even the gigantic heart of the creature stops beating and the beast finally dies.

The endurance possessed by the hounds of The Backrooms is normally a boon that helps make up for their stupidity, but in this case possessing such powerful endurance only allowed the creature to be conscious as an eldritch flesh monster absorbed parts of its body. Gustavo, still caught in the throes of his alien instincts continues to absorb parts of the monster until not even bones remain and when he’s done he falls to his knees, his eyes wide and filled with fear as he ceases to be controlled by his instincts.

“What… What the fuck?!” He asks, loudly but thankfully not loudly enough to get the attention of the other hounds.

He looks at his hands and he sees that they are unchanged, still human-looking things, but as he stares at them he can feel slight motion underneath his skin, and he can sense newfound, obviously supernatural malleability. He can tell that if he wanted to change how the things look all it’d take is intent, and a clear mental picture of how he wants them to change.

“I… I absorbed that thing… That gigantic dog…” He mutters, doing his best to comprehend the nightmarish shit he did while under the influence of disturbingly natural feeling instincts. He feels his stomach tying itself in knots, and he’s thankful that he didn’t have breakfast because he’s certain that if he did he would throw up whatever he had eaten.

“What am I?! How did I do that?!” He wonders, needing a beat to comprehend the downright Lovecraftian shit he did to that dog when he smelled its blood and heard its pain.

Unbeknownst to him, his nightmarish body has begun the process of absorbing the gigantic hound’s body. Even now his monstrous body is dissecting each part of the creature that he absorbed, in an attempt to incorporate the best elements of the beast’s anomalous physiology.

Gustavo is on the floor for several minutes as he recovers from what he just did. Eventually, though, the young man manages to begin to mentally bounce back, his mind itself already deeply anomalous and capable of recovering from things far worse than this, even if he doesn’t consciously realize it yet. He gets up and he elects to continue moving towards his goal instead of risking more Lovecraftian body horror by going to investigate the fluid the hounds, minus the one he killed, are drinking.

The young Latino turns and makes his way “North” instead of going “East” like he would have to if he wanted to investigate the fluid and the other hounds. In a matter of moments, he is resuming his journey and continuing to search for an exit out of this level.

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