When Ira Moress blinked, the hallway she'd been walking through folded itself like a napkin and politely asked her to get lost.
Literally.
A floating sign appeared in midair, written in shimmering sigil glyphs:
> "You Are Now Elsewhere. Have Fun. Bring Snacks."
She blinked again. "...Fair."
The rest of her team was gone. Probably doing boring things like strategizing, remembering trauma, or being tall. Typical.
Ira was surrounded by what looked like an abandoned child's birthday party, if said party had been thrown by an eldritch dimension with ADHD.
The floor was a checkerboard of unstable gravity tiles. The walls flickered between candy-cane stripes and cosmic runes. A cupcake-shaped slime was bouncing near her boots, mewling like a kitten.
"I name you Muffin," she whispered solemnly.
Muffin squeaked.
Then exploded.
Ira wiped frosting off her goggles. "Okay, Muffin II it is."
---
She wandered forward, the hallway pulsing around her. It liked her. That was worrying.
Every few meters, a new hazard manifested:
A hallway that looped back on itself infinitely (she left a shoe behind to mark it)
A giant rubber duck with glowing red eyes (she stared it down until it popped)
A piano that tried to eat her shadow (she played the opening of Beethoven's Fifth and it hissed at her in German)
Eventually, she reached a large chamber labeled:
> "SECTOR 9¾: GLITCHED REALITY HOLDING"
The door opened with a soft purr. Inside were floating platforms spinning around a central void like a gravity blender.
"Yesssss," she whispered with glee.
---
Instead of crossing it normally like a sane person, she pulled out a pouch of enchanted marbles, tossed them into the void, and rode the resulting spatial shockwave across the platforms.
Three sigil beasts appeared. She named them Chuck, Daggerface, and Mildred.
She didn't fight them.
She outsmarted them by tricking the chamber into thinking it was lunchtime and teleporting them all into a fridge.
One tried to escape. She yeeted a sock at it with spatial precision. Critical hit.
---
Halfway through solving a Rubik's cube made of portals, she found a control room — empty but alive with static.
A message flickered onto the screen:
> "Architect Sigil Detected – Accessing Memory Layer."
> "Unknown Code Signature: MORESS-CLASS"
> "Override: Approved"
The floor beneath her turned into a holographic web of energy. She floated upward, surrounded by streams of data.
"Whoa," she muttered. "I have access?"
A synthetic voice spoke:
> "You are not Lucien Drex."
She crossed her arms. "Good guess."
> "You are a spatial anomaly with root-level chaos entropy."
"Sounds like a compliment."
> "Probability of stable reality: 8%. Acceptable."
The system lit up. She now had limited override privileges.
---
So what did she do?
She renamed every corridor in the current sector:
"Snacc Hall"
"Nope Tunnel"
"The Room of Infinite Breadsticks"
"That Place With the Sobbing Chairs"
She drew mustaches on the holographic staff portraits.
She activated an airhorn every time someone stepped on Tile 23-B.
She programmed a flock of paper birds to follow Caelum and whisper, "We know what you did last semester."
Then she broke into the surveillance logs and rewound footage until she found something… interesting:
A memory of Lucien, alone, drawing a sigil with his own blood. The room around him glitched as he whispered to a mirror:
> "Erase it all. If they remember, I'll disappear."
The system crashed. The footage scrambled.
Ira frowned.
Then smiled.
"I'm telling no one," she whispered. "Yet."
---
After that, she rigged the exit chamber to eject her in style.
Using six rubber balls, a mini trampoline, and a jar of stardust she found in Sector 7, she launched herself into a sigil slide and blasted back into the main hallway like a fireworks finale.
Lucien looked up from scribbling nonsense on a napkin. "Oh good, she's alive."
Renn dropped his donut. "Did you just teleport on a glitter rocket?"
Ira curtsied.
"I call it: 'Spatial Re-Entry Via Controlled Explosive Sass.'"
Caelum rubbed his temples. "She's stronger than any of us and I hate it."
Lucien tilted his head. "At this point, I'm just hoping she doesn't find the chicken dimension."
Ira winked.
Too late..