Chapter 2: 02 → Hollow’s Leave → Ab/Normality

The best laid plans of mortal men — for example, calling emergency services in a panic to report your own kidnapping — often go awry. In this case, they went awry because Josh’s phone had no connection.

Dang, right? He’d just have to roll with it, then. Definitely doable. All he had to do was pretend as though he wanted to be kidnapped. That it was definitely completely normal that he was in this place.

(No, this was decidedly not completely normal.)

Oculum was a strange world, and not just because it had two moons and no cellular connection. No, it was strange in many aspects. Especially to a completely normal person, one that possessed only two eyes, one tongue, and zero tentacles. In other words, especially to someone like the utterly boring Josh Holliday.

When he’d first arrived, the clearing they were in seemed to be surrounded by forest. However, that idea had quickly been proven wrong. The trees? Yeah, they had eyes too. And just past the treeline...? Well, that was a completely sheer, oddly-straight cliff at an exact 90° angle. Except... looking tentatively over the edge... the cliff face had grass as well, sticking straight out, and there were more trees growing sideways further down. Josh’s brain couldn’t quite comprehend what he was looking at, and he was feeling extremely dizzy doing so. 

“Oh, come on, then,” the skater girl said, shoving him straight off the cliff.

“Eeep!” he squeaked, expecting to fall past the trees and into the endless abyss... 

...But somehow landing safely on the grass only a moment later.

Wait... what? 

Hesitantly, carefully... Josh got back to his knees, expecting at any moment to fall sideways down into the trees past him, but... he didn’t. Gravity was very clearly in his favour. And now the cliff seemed to be where he’d just been, instead... a cliff that the three eldritch girls walked up from as well a moment later, swinging up over the edge like three vampires rising up from their respective coffins.

He stared at them as they walked past, then peeked back over the edge to see the clearing they’d come from. How...?

“Well, that’s kind of weird,” he said, looking back and forth between the cliff and the girls.

Ulisa glanced back at him and rolled her three eyes. “Get up, deadweight,” she said, moving on.

“O-okay,” he mumbled. This place was strange.

Shortly after, they’d reached a fence, and gone through a gate, and Josh found himself at a town square. On the far side, a large, strange clocktower sat... 

Strange. Strange, everything was strange! It wasn’t just the clocktower. Even just the street between the town square and the park was strange — it didn’t look anything like any street Josh had ever seen. Instead of being paved with, like, asphalt or something, it was a colourful, crystalline, partially-transparent material which extended deep into the ground, and it seemed to produce light, too, because there weren’t any streetlights, and yet the bottoms of all the buildings seemed illuminated.

And as far as those buildings were concerned... All the buildings were odd; all of them incredibly varied, a mismatch of different architectural styles as though they’d been plucked from all over the world, through all periods of history... (along with from other places outside the world... and... from the future, too, potentially?) And it wasn’t even just the architectural styles that made the buildings so odd... It was also that nearly all of the buildings were placed at strange angles; some tilted towards the road, some stretched far higher than they had any right to, farther into the sky than he could even see, spiralling away like the concept of architectural stability was a joke. Some weren’t even connected to the ground. One building even appeared to be inside out, and... well, he didn’t know how to describe that one, or even how to process it mentally.

“Why is everything so... strange?” Josh asked, mostly to himself.

The goth girl responded, though, sounding a little frustrated. “It is strange to  you because you’re an extraplanar, and don’t belong here.”

“R-right,” he said, looking away from her to escape her gaze. 

Josh eventually found his eyes drifting back to the clocktower, the largest of the structures, and in some ways, the most bizarre. It looked almost like Big Ben pulled straight out of London, yet... it was also partially transparent, and it coiled around itself like some kind of spring. And the actual clock face? That was completely unreadable... Or at least, he had no idea how to read it. Why was it divided into a dark half and a light half? What were all those strangely-shaped hands? And why was it covered in squiggles?

“Is that actually the time?” Josh asked.

“Yes,” the short, grumpy goth girl growled, still nearby, not even bothering to look at him. And if she had looked at him, he had a feeling she’d have just given him another glare or a grimace.

Pulling his phone out of his pocket again, Josh compared the time. Hmm. He couldn’t tell if there was a minute or hour hand, given that they moved so slowly, but there were hands on the face that seemed stationary, so perhaps...? And the one hand that was perceptibly moving... that could be a second hand, couldn’t it?

“What does the rest of it mean?” he asked.

The goth girl groaned in frustration, clutching onto her long white hair. “It’s the forecast! It is currently eleven thousand years into the dark side of the centimillenia, and the forecast currently calls for vexation. And it, as per usual, is accurate, as I am very vexed at the moment!”

“S-sorry,” Josh said, and the short girl shook her head at him, before stalking off.

Suddenly Ludi zoomed past, directly in front of him, and Josh fell backwards in surprise, phone flying out of his grasp, clocktower and the goth girl forgotten. Shortly after Ludi rushed past a second time, directly over his phone, and Josh jumped back up and grabbed it, terrified it had been smashed.

You are reading story Extra Credit for an Eldritch Horror at novel35.com

...It was fine. Surprised, he glanced at Ludi to see her grinning back at him toothily. Her skateboard... didn’t even have wheels. She was floating.

Josh Holliday sighed and carefully put his phone back in his pocket, shaking his head, then jogged to catch back up with Ulisa and the grumpy goth girl, glancing nervously at the strange people down the road. He wasn’t sure how he’d managed to miss them while he’d looked around at the buildings, but... there were definitely... other eldritch beings here, a mixture of strange and kind of scary, but less in an “oh god i’m going to die” way and more in a “my brain is failing to process what i’m looking at” way. Their sizes and shapes varied a lot — some of them were impossibly tall and spindly, some of them small and rotund, some with too many limbs, many of those limbs being tentacles. All of them, however, had at least three eyes, and most of them had more.

It was very soon after that that he suddenly got a bigger spike of fear. The moment? Well, probably specifically when he noticed that a large number of the eyes he was seeing were all trained directly on him. And with the number of eyes he was seeing... That was a lot. So many eyes, so many more than he’d ever have had on him on Earth, even if he made a scene. He couldn’t help but try to make himself small and hide behind Ulisa. It didn’t really work, though, given he was taller than she was.

“Wh-why do they all keep staring at me?” he whimpered, interrupting the girls’ conversation.

“Because you are an oddity,” the third girl snapped, as if it was obvious.

Right. Of course. In a world where everything is bizarre, Josh was so normal that he was the odd one out. Grumbling about the unfairness of his situation — not fitting in at home, and fitting in even less in this horrifying eldritch wor— okay, no, it was a good thing that he didn’t fit in here. Probably.

“Wait,” Ulisa said suddenly, spinning around, the eyes on her temples suddenly reopened and a panicked expression on her features. “Not that way.”

Josh hurriedly followed her and the goth girl down an alley, Ludi peeking out at the street for one moment longer before catching up.

“L-ludi?” he asked, hoping it was okay that he said her name. “Wh-what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Ludi shrugged. “But anything Ulisa’s afraid of can’t be good,” she winked, then rolled past.

“You all are just trying to keep me all jumpy…” he grumbled, looking back where they came one more time, just in time to see a huge, glowing eye appear at the end of the alleyway... Where they’d just been. Simultaneously, he was yanked to the side, and found himself on another sidewalk. 

Dark tendrils retreated from behind Ulisa. “Don’t fall behind, extraplanar,” she said, glaring at him. 

“S-sorry,” he mumbled, then looked up and immediately staggered backwards. “Is that a castle?” he choked.

It looked like a castle — a huge castle — but... it was far different than any he’d ever seen before. Being a castle didn’t make it immune to the whole... not-obeying-the-laws-of-physics stuff that all the rest of the buildings were doing. No, and, honestly, in some ways the castle was even worse than most. Josh counted three separate towers that weren’t even connected to the ground; they were shattered at the point where once attached, the tops hanging in the sky, unmoving, as though gravity had just... forgotten about them.

“Yes. That is a castle,” the extremely grumpy goth girl said, like she was talking to a brainless slug, and he looked back over at her to see the biggest glare yet.

“Don’t mind Terisse,” Ludi said, patting his shoulder. “She just... doesn’t like you.”

Ugggh, these girls! “Well, that makes me feel better, thanks,” he said, sarcastically.

Ludi laughed.

“The time for fun has come to an end,” Ulisa said, turning around to stare at us with a frown, two additional eyes open on her cheeks. “We must be quiet, and careful, to enter Oculum proper.”

Wait. He’d thought they were already in Oculum. Was “Oculum proper” the buildings or was it the plane?

“Yes, yes,” the girl with the pointy teeth sighed. “Wouldn’t want to be caught and consumed by the blob.” She looked away, then mumbled, “Again...”

“Or worse,” Terisse hummed, “Forced to write lines for ten thousand years.”

“…T-ten... thous—” he swallowed, suddenly glad that he’d been yanked out from that alleyway. “Y-you know, I never thought I’d be kidnapped... But I never even imagined a situation where I’d rather stay kidnapped.”

Ludi snorted. “I like this extraplanar. Can we keep it, Ulisa?”

“No,” Ulisa said, and then there was a strange crinkling noise as the fence peeled away, forming a gateway into the grounds of Oculum. “Hurry now,” she gestured. “I can only hold this open for... Oh, I don’t know. A decade or two.”

“That’s like... a really long time,” he said, before she yanked him in with a tentacle and the gate uncrinkled behind them.

“It is, for Oculum,” she chuckled, hand over her mouth. “My ability, however, outlasts my patience.”