Looking in the mirror for the first time since before the expedition went wrong was odd, to say the least. I couldn’t notice anything remarkably different about myself, but that was the problem. In fact, in this reflection I looked just about exactly as I did that day, down to the clothes I had worn then but was most certainly not wearing now. That much was eerie, sure, but seeing myself in a labsuit, my former labsuit, wasn’t the only thing I had noticed, especially since it seemed less like a solid reflection and more of an image put over the rest of what I wore.

A bit more unusual was that my hair was also just as it had been, too, and after nearly a month of not doing a thing it I knew I should have a shaggy mop with at least the beginnings of some wiry beard even if I couldn’t grow facial hair to save my life. Instead, I was clean-shaven, like I’d barely put the razor down an hour ago, and my light brown hair was tightly combed exactly like I wore it out by the Oort. Unlike the illusionary suit, this was real, running my hand along my chin, over my scalp, all of it verified that. I didn’t much like the fact that as soon as I blinked, my ruffled hair was immediately returned to the pristine state it had been moments ago.

The most surreal part of my own reflection was that my mirrored eyes were closed. Not screwed shut in agony or cracked like I was just waking up, but I simply couldn’t see my own eyes through the lids. It looked like I’d been caught mid-blink despite my eyes being very clearly open. I didn’t much care for that either, but nothing I could do would get my reflection to open his eyes.

But the worst part of it all was that I knew, I just knew that the Every-Thing was staring back at me even through the closed lids. I could feel its gaze, its attention was like a physical force and now it was in two places paying attention to the one of me. I tried to tear my eyes away, I couldn’t I was frozen, one hand on the lip of the sink and the other back under the running faucet and my reflection was in the exact same pose. That eyeless gaze refused to break away, and there wasn’t a thing I could do until I heard it start speaking at me again.

“Total great saw water had mirth happy new. Can curiosity may end shameless explained.”

And then its attention was gone, and I could start gasping for breath as I dove out of sight of the mirror. I smacked onto the ground, sending an errant towel rack tumbling down on top of me. It was light, though, and I was too busy trying to not remember the Thing’s absolute presence in that moment, the words that it dribbled into my skull like syrup, its gaze from through the mirror and inside my own head.

The fear and the panic were stamped out quickly, though, and all I was left with was a lingering revulsion at what the mirror showed me, it was mild but enough so that when I stood up, I approached it from the side and lifted it off the wall, setting it down facing an empty wall, then took note of how I’d left my surroundings. It took me all of half an hour to turn one room into a freezer and partially dismantle another, and I was starting to worry about the future of this house if I wound up staying here for too long. I decided there and then that any future practice would be done outside and could only hope that I didn’t have any neighbors.

That whole experience made me wary to jump right back into practice, though, and that was fine by me since I still had yet to eat, and felt like I really should by this point. Looking back down at my hand, I saw the fingers still weren’t perfect, but now they were back to my usual skin color at least. I just wish they didn’t look and feel like the wrinkled and withered digits of someone old and infirm, but that’d probably change just like everything else did.

I was conflicted, though. I wanted to eat, but looking into the den and seeing what had become of it was pretty sufficient to dissuade me from trying my hand at cooking again, at least for the day. At the same time, though, I didn’t want to go out to eat, as childish as that sounded. I just didn’t want to deal with people, especially if I already knew those people. I didn’t know what to do at all, and I wound up just standing in my bathroom for what felt like hours but was probably no more than a couple of minutes. In the end, I decided to do neither, instead just ordering something.

One phone call later, I had a pizza on its way for a rematch, and a conviction to just swear off the stuff entirely if it results in anything else screaming. A mention of my family name was enough for them to promise my order would be their priority, although it wasn’t like deliveries ever took longer than a few minutes to begin with. It wouldn’t take very long at all for it to get here, but hopefully I had enough time to at least clean the catastrophe in my den a bit.

It would have been much easier if the thing wasn’t exactly as cold as it had been when I left, maybe a bit colder even, and I had no intention of using my hands near that, not when I was starting to feel my fingers a little bit. They may have gone back to being an entirely different color, but there wasn’t the aged look they’d had earlier. They looked almost normal. Instead, I returned to the kitchen, or tried to before I felt something digging into my heel again. Biting back my anger, I jerked my head downwards to glare at the offending glass lump, and its deceptively pointed edges.

With one hand, I picked the thing up, and whipped it across the room. I heard a soft thump of silicon hitting cushion, probably the couch, and was satisfied for the moment. I resumed my walk, rooting around in a cabinet for something I could use to clean at least some of that. I returned to the den wearing grilling gloves, a pan in one hand and a spatula in the other. I carefully approached the arctic carpet as I crouched down. At first, I tried scraping it off with the metal tool, but when that did nothing, I just took the pan and tried smashing it with similar results. I glared a moment longer at my refrozen foe, hefting the pan above my head with the determination to at least chip the stuff before I heard the knocking at my door.

“One moment.” I said, raising my voice to be heard as I stood back up, setting down the pan and the spatula and ignoring the dents in both. I opened the door, not seeing a drone or a golem like I’d expected. They may not be everywhere anymore, but they were still quite popular in multiple places, so seeing an actual person delivering my food was unusual. Then I realized he was giving me a decidedly wary look, trying not to be too obvious as he glanced over my shoulder towards the den.

I sighed, then realized that was likely the wrong approach as the boy almost recoiled. Carefully, I reached out, taking the pizza, then shut the door behind me, practically collapsing on the couch in the den.

“Ow, why!” I screamed, as the nugget of pain that I had didn't think I tossed onto the couch dug into the small of my back. I barely managed to save the box in my arms, but as soon as I was steady I tossed it down onto the coffee table in front of while I dug the stone out. I glared at the lumpy thing, it was foggy and pretty lumpy, utterly unremarkable, but it kept on finding its way back to me. Gritting my teeth, I debated chucking it outside before realizing that it would come back to bite me, somehow. Instead, I just put it on the side table, right by the orange-globe.

That was enough to calm me down for the moment, and so I tucked into my meal. It didn’t take me long to finish the pie, nor was it enough to leave me feeling any less hungry than earlier, but at the same time, it wasn’t really all that bad to begin with. More than anything, I was thankful to have actual food again, and I was finally content to just lay my head to one side and fall asleep.

And then, I tossed over to the other side, content to actually fall asleep. It took me a whole fifteen minutes before I realized sleep just wasn’t coming right then. It took me another fifteen, staring at the blackened wall in front of me before I realized I just didn’t want to watch anything either. I needed to move, I needed to move badly, because for once it didn’t hurt to move.

I looked at the door, still unsure, before deciding to bite the bullet and step out. Aristoteles was a standardized dome, so despite being barely one-hundred hours into the day around here, the natural sunlight had been dimmed, giving us something resembling nighttime. I looked out at the city, as soon as the grass ended the grey began, and just like any other city, the activity never ceased. The estate, meanwhile, was even more still than earlier, and the separation was surreal.

What I wanted wasn’t stillness, though, and despite my earlier reservations my body carried me towards the outskirts of the city, no destination in mind aside from somewhere else, somewhere noisy, but somewhere without the people making the noise. It was probably beyond difficult finding somewhere like that, but each time one foot fell in front of the other I felt my head clearing just a little more.

I wandered along back alleys, just taking in but not paying attention to the dark and pristine streets. The air was so clean it felt almost sterile, one of the few places considered a cradle of humanity that could make that claim. Despite the air being calm and empty, I could feel a buzz in the air as I cut across an empty road, stepping from between two towering monoliths of concrete and plastisteel before diving back into a different crevice. I was far from the heart of the city, though, it’d easily take kilometers of walking before I found my way into an area that wasn’t purely business and clean, and I didn’t want to find that anyway.

I was very content to just let the black and grey blend together as I walked, but when I suddenly smacked into someone right in front of the next in my unwritten list of alleys I was ripped right out of introspection. Luckily, the man I collided with hardly seemed fazed, he actually looked more amused than anything, though he was trying to hide it and I couldn’t tell why.

“You okay there? I’ve gotta admit, wasn’t expecting you to just run into me like that.” I was still frowning at being interrupted so suddenly, even if it wasn’t his fault, but I still managed to respond.

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I was just trying to clear my head, get some fresh air. Rough few weeks.” I was trying to keep it simple, I still wanted to do exactly what I’d told him. I also didn’t really feel like spending too much time with some random stranger on a sidewalk to begin with.

“Ouch, I know how things can be. Hey, my name’s Donny, if you want to talk about it, I can try to help you out?” He wore a slight smile, and I was tempted to do so, it was pretty clear out still, not many other people around, and it was pretty calm.

“Not… really. Sorry Donny, I’m feeling a lot better now, thanks for snapping me out of that funk, but I’m going to head home now.” He frowned at that, seeming disappointed, but then he shrugged and walked off in the opposite direction. I turned around too, I didn’t lie when I said I felt better, and aimless wandering seemed to do much more for me than I gave it credit for.

I remembered the rough direction I came from, and it certainly wouldn’t be hard to find the estate that covered a sizeable fraction of this entire dome. The dome itself also seemed to concur with my idea of returning home, it wasn’t long after I began my walk that the darkened sphere above me started growing more transparent, letting that sunlight start trickling in. By the time I’d reached my cabin once more, it was properly dawn, with the lightening grey glass taking on a notable mild orange hue before the day began in earnest.

I stepped back inside, tossing my shoes aside as I did so, finally feeling ready to get some sort of rest, before I felt something threatening to bite into my foot if I shifted my weight forward.

“Why are you back on the floor, how did you even get back down here.” I was exasperated now, but I wanted to finally nip this thing in the bud now that I remembered it. I was still wary about setting it loose on the world, so I opted for a different method.

“Stop annoying me.” I scolded it, fully aware that I was in fact talking to an object. As I did, though, I pushed just a bit of energy out through my hand and into the bland creation. I felt the tingling chill of my arm threatening to sink, but I cut off the flow before it started to happen in earnest. The glass rock in my hand shivered as the energy that created it flowed through it once again, but apart from hearing something pop in the back of my head nothing much happened.

Annoyed and a bit disappointed, I set it back on my table, and as I walked upstairs to my bed I debated if I should just throw it away or keep it for practice, however I might do that.