Ad Nauseam

I’m going to die here, or maybe I can’t. The only thing I have here is a pen that never seems to run out, and this book that has infinite pages and funnily enough is water proof.

I originally woke up in a strange room with yellow wallpaper, fluorescent lights that hummed, smelling the mold and mildew infesting the walls.

The last thing I remember before I ended up here was I was watching the news, it was tense, as a hurricane ravaged my hometown. Oh God, I remember now, the roof of my house and the walls collapsed and I was stuck under the rubble.

It hurt horribly, a hundred pounds of wood collapsed my chest and lungs, logs dislocated my arm. I was trapped in suffocating darkness with small gaps in the rubble, taunted with light and oxygen that I was deprived of.

I don’t know how long I was under that rubble,

I just remember thinking hard about the necklace my grandma gave me, the one that she said to me, if I was ever in real trouble, to focus on it and pray. Whatever god answered, they are a cruel bastard no doubt.

Some people if they were looking at me would probably say I’m obsessed, but when I don’t write anything for long periods of time

It feels like something creeps up out of the back of my mind, I don’t know if this is like a codependency thing or if this place

...Wants me to write?

I’m not sure

I have honestly just been wandering around aimlessly, it’s like a maze, I tried to do that one thing where you put your hand on the right wall, or wait, was it supposed to be the left wall?

I tried both and I haven’t reached anything like an exit yet, though I did find a shovel.

Wait, I actually damaged the walls. I was expecting them to be indestructible or something like that

Soberingly, I bashed at the walls for, maybe fourty-five minutes? And when I broke through to the other side, it was just more of these rooms.

So I’m just back in these rooms.

I thought maybe there would be something different, I was half right.

It’s the same yellow rooms, but this one is a bit odd. It has these dark rectangular holes scattered on the ground, going down seemingly forever.

When I looked down into the holes, I felt my brain strain, trying to generate something in the absolute nothingness of the holes, I kept thinking I saw lights or hearing voices.

Other than the holes, I see some strange wall segments, they aren’t thick enough to be load bearing, and due to the width of the room don’t serve as meaningful barriers.

I don’t want to know what happens if I fall down those holes.

Given the shovel didn’t really help, I threw it down the hole. I saw it descend into darkness.

I can’t tell if I heard it or not, I may have heard it hit some ambiguous ground, or was my mind just continuing to fill the void?

I can’t tell.

Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, please

My name is Ryan Forger!

For a second. I forgot my name.

I wrote it down so I don’t forget it again. What even is this place, why am I here?

I could only remember my name after writing down for a bit, and forgot after not writing for a bit.

Looking back over what I wrote, there is some stuff missing from my memory, every minute I don’t write, have I been losing pieces of myself?

A necklace is what sent me here? Is that what this is?

I need to keep moving

The fluorescent lights beaming down is making me feel light headed. The unrelenting light and noise , seemingly no matter where I go. I’m far past the room with holes, now with those meaningless wall segments scattered unaligned, confusing and obstructing my path.

I am thirsty, and I’m starting to get hungry.

Well that’s one article of clothing done for now. I stepped on a soaked part of the yellow carpet, and my sock seemed to just absorb all of the water squeezed out by my step. Considering I don’t want trench foot since I may be walking around

Whatever this place is

I took the sock off. I’m not sure how well it will dry here but I can keep it with me just in case.

I realized after taking my sock off, my body has impressions in it, like when a firm shape presses against you for a long time. Normally these go away naturally, but assuming this is from the rubble, it’s been hours since I woke up here

They still aren’t gone.

I tried pulling on it, and my skin

Snapped into place? Like I pulled it back out of the indentation

When I push on my skin it reassumes the shape, like that one memory metal, nylon or something.

What’s happened to me?

I’ve been walking down different hallways with open doorways, never able to escape that rotting smell with seemingly no single instance of intense rot, as if this whole seemingly infinite place is rotting just enough to permeate it.

I see something weird in the distance, I’m writing to keep my minds shadows at bay

I found something

It looks like a light switch.

Should I flip it, I don’t know

Other than those holes, and this switch, virtually nothing has broken up the mundanity.

It must have been seven hours, maybe ten? I’m not fully sure any more.

These lights

I can’t let them determine my judgement, but god are they maddening, is that something I should factor in or am I overestimating how bad it is

Can I even tell how bad it is anymore?

I don’t know

There is no guarantee this switch even affects the lights I guess, but if I leave it here there is no guarantee I will be able to find it again.

I think

My stomach is gnawing at me, It’s making it hard to think. But my body doesn’t feel weaker, but

My thoughts are struggling, like the burden has shifted from my body to my brain.

These damned lights, they are louder than normal fluorescent lights, they have to be.

I did it, I turned the lights off

---

Darkness enveloped me, writing this was difficult.

Though this darkness isn’t like when I was trapped under that rubble, this is an infinite expanse of void, rather than a crushing darkness.

My sense of proprioception largely was all that guided me, as a ̶s̶w̶e̶e̶t̶ silence overtook me.

Scratch ‘sweet’, those lights were grating. But the silence only made me realize something about myself, somehow I hadn’t realized it but my breathing was spasmic, not a continuous respiration, but jumpy and inefficient.

I suppose the rubble that fell on my chest killed many of my chest muscles instantly, necrosing them.

I bumped into walls, sometimes softly and I would gently reorient, though other times I would crash into them and fall in the dark ground I was unable to see.

I don’t like this, what if I fall into one of those holes I couldn’t see.

I’m not even sure why I can see this book or pen, or my body, it’s faint and dim, but somehow in this lightless space, I can visualize them as if I’m really seeing them.

Every step is nerve racking, after thinking about how I could fall into an infinitely deep hole, I began to regret flipping that switch.

I did attempt to retrace my steps, but both the impenetrable darkness and the potential for the rooms around me to shift, I couldn’t find it.

Still, despite the darkness, the smell of mold and mildew never quite let up. I just don’t know what to do anymore, it’s more of the same as before, but now it feels even more meaningless as I can’t even see anymore.

I don’t even have much to say anymore, I am essentially just writing to keep the back of my mind at bay

My hands just felt the degraded wallpaper on the walls, sliding across as I walked along it.

With no stimuli

Visually anyway

I can’t do much but focus on the hunger and the dryness of my throat and the hard pounding of my heart.

I hear something

The distant sound of a fluorescent light, but I can’t see its light. The direction of the sound is shifting, it seems to.

I walked swiftly, going around various corners that I ran into a third of the time, pushing past the pain with something like adrenaline.

Dead end, the single fluorescent long exposed bulb lit up the dead end. A large green dumpster, it had a foul smell that compounded with the mildew, mold, and carpet rot.

Oddly the smell of the dumpster isn’t as bad as one would expect, it’s not exactly floral, but I have smelled worse.

I approached the dumpster, my weakened chest muscles making it a bit harder to open the large lid, which banged against the back wall.

Inside were a few trash bags, and an unopened bottle of Almond water.

Normally I would be hesitant to drink mystery water, but it’s unopened, and I can go a few weeks without food, but I need water.

I grabbed the bottle of Almond water, and rummaged through the bags of garbage for anything else useful, though I didn’t find anything that stood out.

Clearly this place works with some irregular logic, so I had an idea. I looked up at the single fluorescent light beaming down from above the dumpster.

I jumped up and grabbed onto the metal bearings that attached the lights mechanisms to the ceiling, and held on.

As I held myself above the ground, my weight began make the light give away, or no

It was this part of the roof.

Suddenly I fell with the fluorescent light in my hands, with a broken off piece of the roof it was attached to stuck to it

I knew it!!

The wires were snapped off of course, but the light still glowed, detached from it. I angled the light and stood it up, facing in front of me, as I kicked it, sliding it forward with my foot.

Finally, the god forsaken illogic of this place works in my favor for once.

I continued, sliding the fluorescent light ahead of me, at this point I had decided to keep going in the direction I mostly had been, to try and find something.

Still nothing of importance

Now I’m just writing again to keep myself together. The more I write the more I notice odd things. This necklace my grandma gave me, it’s this odd looking key thing, but instead of the usual teeth, it has teeth but they are just wrong, really focusing on them, the proportions seem to shift. Other than that it just has the number 0 engraved into it.

Was it always like that or am I now hallucinating that, but either way, a key as a necklace is an odd gift, even then I thought it was weird, but I wasn’t going to seem ungrateful to grandma of course.

What was that?

The light turned slightly when I was sliding it, and I saw something.

That moved

Then I swear I heard something, stepping, and slithering, and scrapping.

I need to get out of here.

I continued, upping the pace.

Until I stumbled upon something new, a door, engraved on it a word, ‘The Manila Room’

The door was a fine polished light wooden door, with an embedded plaque with the engraving.

Regardless of whether what I saw and heard was real or my mind crafting something from darkness, I need to get away from that. Assuming that whatever is behind this door is truly away from here in any meaningful sense.

I opened the door.

The door gave way, a creaking noise ringing out, it was distinct from the blare of fluorescent lights, footsteps, or the potential things lurking in the dark. Revealing a room with soft on the eyes beige wall paper.

I stepped inside, now on the light side of the propped up broken off fluorescent light I had been sliding around this whole place.

The room has its own fluorescent lights, not unlike that other area before I flicked that light switch.

The ground and ceiling were a lighter shade of beige, though they were mono color with no designs unlike the wallpaper.

In the room was a simple table and chair, atop the table was a piece of paper and a watch.

It’s a basic watch, with a leather strap, all it can do is tell the time, and set a timer, but I could see that coming in handy.

As for the paper, well in all the media I have seen, when a character has an infinite book, they can just put paper into it and it’ll just fuse it into the book.

Okay that didn’t work.

I’m just gonna write down the key points if they are important.

Alright, it’s this M.E.G group talking about this being ‘Level 0’, and to ‘no-clip’ through a wall, which can either be odd looking or by walking into a wall at just the right angle.

‘No-clip’ I know the term from some 3d modeling work I did, and I think my little cousin said it about one of his games? From what I know it means to move through something, like your mesh overriding theirs.

What the hell are the ‘Backrooms’? Is that what this place is? I guess this paper had some useful information. If I trust what it’s saying, I need to get to this ‘Level 1’.

Luckily, from what it’s said, if I’m still on this ‘Level 0’ then can’t I just keep walking into this place’s walls at different angles until I get it?

There were other things, but since I’m leaving this place I don’t see the need to waste time writing about its intricacies.

Okay it’s been about thirty five minutes, and nothing’s happened yet. Had I not had the context, I would think that this was a prank or something, but unless the makers of‘Susunu! Denpa Shōnen’are behind it, I don’t think so.

I had tried every angle I could think of, then trying slightly in between two angles I had already tried and so on. Shifting slightly, maybe it’s my footing?

In Blender, it was always corners that caused issues. I tried, still it seemed to fail, I tried those angles once again, when suddenly.

The wall subsumed me, like it had finally accepted me into it or something like that. Then spat me out on some other side, not on any dimension I know of, just somewhere perpendicular.

I found myself in a drastically different environment, like an expansive concrete parking garage, halfway abandoned. As long puddles slowly evaporated into an almond smelling fog. Though these puddles never seem to lose volume.

Stained fissures in the concrete area are scattered around, pipes line the walls, with many concrete pillars with yellow stripes.

Right, so for the sake of notekeeping and keeping the shadows occupied, and because I’m not sure how many of these levels there are before I get out

If I can get out.

I’m going to start labeling these segments by Levels so...