Shigeo didn’t remember falling asleep. Or blinking. Or even breathing differently.

One moment he was upright in the hallway at school, a textbook in hand, mid-step. The next—he wasn’t.

The floor beneath him was matte and paper-flat, like it had been drawn in crayon by a child with poor depth perception. It didn’t creak. It didn’t echo. It just was. Colors hung in the air like bruises—floating patches of green and red that buzzed when looked at too long. A perfect circle drifted past him at shoulder height, 2D and wobbling like it resented being perceived. When he reached toward it, it zipped backward like a startled bird.

He looked up.

A whale the size of a city block hung motionless in the sky. Its skin was stitched in patterns like map lines, its eye—singular, massive—tracked him without blinking. The longer he looked at it, the less sure he was that it had ever moved.

There was no wind. No sound. Just an ambient pressure, like a room that had never been opened.

He began to walk.

To his left, a line of mirrors stretched like teeth across an endless wall. None of them reflected him. Instead, each showed an infinite darkness, textured only by slow ripples, as if something huge and far away was shifting just beneath the surface. One mirror cracked slightly as he passed, and the sound of it breaking didn’t quite match the timing of the fracture.

Shigeo didn’t react. His hands remained in his pockets. He kept walking.

Eventually, he saw them.

A person. His age, maybe. Sitting sideways in a half-sunken chair, one leg slung over the armrest, posture relaxed like they were just between classes. Their head tilted slightly as if listening to something far off. Their eyes were open—but not in a way that suggested awareness. Just... routine.

They didn’t look surprised to see him. Didn’t even look up.

Shigeo stopped a few paces away. The whale above let out a low, tectonic groan—not a sound, but a shudder through the air, like a thought too heavy to be spoken aloud.

“…Hey,” Shigeo said, voice as flat as the floor beneath him.

His gaze flicked to the black mirrors. Then to the person.

“Is this your mind?”

Pause.

“Do you want me to leave?”