His heartbeat didn’t slow down, but panic was starting to change to excitement. He didn’t know the value of a citrine, but one this large had to be worth something. Enough to at least pay off his cellphone bill and put some gas in his tank, get back on the road, without selling the console.
“Except you’re insane, remember? You’re hallucinating this.”
It was harder and harder to convince himself of that, however. He was now certain he hadn’t died and gone somewhere else. He’d never heard of someone hallucinating this completely and coherently before. If it was a hallucination, it was a remarkably dull one. He expected to see a caterpillar smoking weed or bleeding eyes on the wall or spiders crawling out of his asshole or something. Not a rather boring cave with an ominous altar and a gem that was stuck to his phone.
Stuck firmly to his phone, he soon discovered. When he tried to pull it off, it didn’t move in the slightest. He started tugging as hard as he dared, but that just made his phone creak ominously. He stopped before he broke it.
“Okay, Julian. Time to start applying logic here. Use that brain of yours.”
The idea that he was hallucinating couldn’t be ignored. If that was the case, the smartest thing to do would be to sit still until someone noticed he was missing and came looking. Which would be in seven days, when he was evicted. Before the depressing reality of that thought could settle in, Julian focused himself on the more practical side effect of that - namely, that he’d have died by dehydration in that much time. So sitting still wasn’t an option. He’d have to risk walking.
“You can move,” he said after a moment’s thought. If he was in his apartment, he’d closed the door. So, as long as he made no motion to open a door, he’d be unable to leave. If he wasn’t in his apartment...well, if he wasn’t in his apartment, he had no idea if he was somewhere safe or not, so moving was as safe as not moving.
But first, there was one thing to try. He put the phone and gemstone in his pocket and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Help!”
The sound echoed through the cave. He repeated the shout, over and over, until his throat was hoarse. Then he sat down on the floor and took deep breaths.
One hour. He’d give it one hour. If he was outside and somewhere dangerous, like a street, someone was already nearby and realized he was either blind or insane and trying to help him. If he was inside his apartment, the cheap walls meant one of his neighbors would have heard him and eventually called the cops to get him to shut up if for no other reason.
They’d come and take him away. He’d have to notice that, right?
All he had to do was sit for an hour. In pitch darkness.
He didn’t make it five seconds before pulling his phone back out of his pocket. It stuck when he did, the rough gem catching on the fabric, and he heard something tear when it pulled loose. He breathed a sigh of relief when the light came back on.
Darkness and silence with still air was a terrible combination. His brain had already begun to tell him he was floating in some kind of empty void, that the only real matter was the small square of rock beneath him. Seeing the walls around him, even if they were the product of a hallucination, was better than nothing.
For the first time, the idea in the back of his mind - that he was having a portal fantasy adventure, or that he’d wandered into an isekai story - pushed itself to the forefront of his mind. He pushed it right back to the back where it belonged. Real people didn’t have magical adventures in other worlds. Real people who believed that went crazy. Besides, it definitely couldn’t be an isekai, because no one had hit him with a truck.
Trying to distract himself, he looked at the phone. Even if he couldn’t get data, he had some offline games on here he could play to pass the time until the cops arrived.
No luck there. It was showing him a white screen, with only the word “Syncing” sprawled across it, and a progress bar that showed zero point three percent.
“What the hell are you syncing to?” he asked his phone. It did not respond. He tried pressing the home button, to no response. He tried swiping in various directions, also to no effect. He pressed down the power button to initialize a hard reset...and the screen didn’t even flicker.
“Damnit,” he muttered, looking more closely. Unfortunately, that didn’t give him any useful information. Across the top was the time, which informed him it was 29:73 PAM, and the power bar, which told him he was at one thousand and twelve percent power. And the white background wasn’t completely blank. There were symbols on it, scrolling past like Matrix code, in a slightly darker shade of white, almost unnoticeable unless you were paying attention.
Symbols that almost perfectly matched the ones on the altar.
This was helpful, in that it let him know the phone wouldn’t be of any help.
He laid back on the cold floor and closed his eyes. The sensation of closed eyes and the warmth of the phone and the coolness of the gemstone in his hand helped make this feel less like he was going insane. If he’d had a shirt, he would have balled it up under his head for a pillow. As it was, he had to just rest his skull on the stone.
It was hardly comfortable. But the panic of earlier combined with the anxiety over his finances falling apart had been exhausting.
He didn’t know how long it took - his phone told him it was GA:62 APM last he
