One Must Wonder

Chapter 0: A Strange Place Indeed

Slowly, a green eye opens in the endless, empty darkness.

 This eye belongs to a creature known only as Opaque. They are a strange being to be sure. It had the form of a human, and, were it not for its alien features, might be mistaken for one. They had shoulder-length black hair that clumped into odd flat ends, and bangs that covered the left eye, or rather the black ink that took the original organ's spot. It had the ears of a cat, although pointed down rather than to the skies that its birth plane did not have. It bore the tail of a dragon, however smooth without spikes, comparable to that of a hatchling. Its human face, although marked by the blackness, looked soft, and it was hard to read whether it looked more male or female, the two appearances seemingly interchangeable depending on the light.

 It wore simple clothes, more black and white than any other color, except for the green bowtie and pink sword sheath at its side. The shirt was black with white buttons, and the inner side of the rolled sleeves held striped black and white, quite similar to the pants they wore. It wore red sneakers, and black and white bandages over its arms and legs where they were visible, hiding the layer of blank ink that crept under them like worms on the skin. Floating above their head was a small crown, a simple golden piece with only a single pink star-shaped gem on its front. It wore golden glasses and a bandanna that was pink to its left, and blue to its right, outlined with yellow at its edges and long enough to reach the base of its tail. Compared to a human, Opaque was neither tall nor small, although its tail was around as long as the rest of its body, and its cat-like ears were thin and long to match.

 The creature stirred for the first time in many cycles, countless years in even the longest trip around the sun. 

 As their eye opened, its realms seemed to wake with them. The empty darkness turned into the original blank white around them, still black further off where the realm did not understand its master was awake. Opaque looked around themself and into the black and white with sleepy eyes.

 The creature yawned, stretching its arms before standing up. The air was strange here, although not a surprise since the mother/father had been too deep and too long asleep to maintain the realm. It had fallen back into its wild state, empty.

 They yawned again and, with the flick of a hand, created a room with no walls, but still having wallpaper that one could walk through. They entered the new room, although blank as it was, and began to sculpt the rest of the home it planned for itself. 

 First, it finished the room, a landing room. It was large and tall, the part where they stood was high above the black below. The catwalk formed under their feet, a steel walkway with a steel fence. The high roof appeared an endless black, easy on their one tired eye. They placed an airlock on the wall behind them, locked with a keypad so that no claimed creatures would leave and see the mind-bending emptiness outside of it. No light, no dark, just nothing.

  They walked on, expanding the walkway as they went. Then they created another door, this one not locked, but still a similar look to the exit far behind. They turned and added a few dull lights down the rails with the wave of an arm so that none would fail to understand the length of the passage.

 The next room it created was a sort of lobby, similar to what one would see in a typical hotel. There was a fireplace with seats around, a tv above it. A desk sat in the wall behind that corner, with no staff behind it. It would do for now. The creature moved on, making a small protrusion in the wall to add an elevator to other rooms, far easier than endless halls, it had learned. 

It sculpted many rooms and many floors to hold them, often themed to wrap them together. From necessities like a kitchen and bedrooms to a portal room and giant hologram room. 

 After its long venture had been completed, they made sure to add security levels. It planned to gather living creatures to live here, and different floors would do for different realms. Each would be freaked out by certain levels of creatures, but that was no matter. What mattered was that the important rooms like the portal room were off-limits and that the exit door was never opened or unlocked.

The creature returned to its portal room, and it looked upon the realms it fathered over. It was a god to those worlds, at least before it slept, and to those which would accept their exsistance as truth. It had made each detail of every world, and connect their child worlds to one portal each. The portal room was giant, and each portal was similar to its exit gate. One in particular was a stone arch with a wooden door, inset into a tall willow tree, surrounded by the sterile white of the portal room. The roots of the tree sat on top of the stairwell and looped into the rails, cobwebs spotted it here and there.

It wanted to explore the changes undergone in this world during their slumber, and the many others that were subject to change when not watched.

And so it did.