Ervin was completely and utterly out of breath, a strange and paradoxical state where his body felt both profoundly tired and yet thrumming with a latent, unfamiliar energy. It was a deeply unsettling, overwhelming feeling, a clash of sensations that left him disoriented and anxious. "W-what on earth has happened to me?" he wondered aloud, his voice a shaky whisper in the quiet of his room. He was adrift, unsure of what to do or where to even begin processing this bizarre condition. His mind, scrambling for an anchor, clawed its way backward, trying to piece together the events of the previous night, seeking any clue that could explain his current reality.
"I was just playing that MMO after coming home... right after I was fired..." Ervin reminded himself, the memory of his rough, unwelcome reality crashing down upon him with a renewed weight. What a piece of shit his boss had been, and what a pathetic way to end a career he'd never even loved. Now, on top of the financial ruin and professional humiliation, he had to deal with this… this physical and mental strangeness. What a perfect, terrible way to ruin what should have been a perfectly wonderful morning of sleeping in and forgetting his troubles. The sheer unfairness of it all was a bitter pill to swallow.
Overcome by a desire to escape, he simply rolled over and decided to will himself back to sleep. "Let's just sleep," he muttered into his pillow, "I want to forget all of that!" He turned onto his side, squeezed his eyes tightly shut, and willed for unconsciousness to take him. But a new, subtle wrongness immediately made itself known. He noticed, with a creeping sense of dread, that he could still see. He snapped his eyes open again, blinking in the dim light of his room. "Odd..." he murmured, a frown etching onto his face. He tried the experiment again, closing his eyelids with deliberate force. He knew, rationally, that his eyes were closed. He could feel the pressure of his lids. He knew he shouldn't be seeing anything. Yet, a visual field persisted, showing him the room from a fixed point near his bed. He was seeing without using his eyes.
"What is this?" panic began to lace his thoughts, "Am I having a psychotic break because I lost my job? I didn't even like that job all that much!!" he complained vehemently inside the confines of his own mind. This seemed a disproportionately severe reaction to a job he'd always found tedious. Using this weird, persistent "other vision," he tried once more to force himself into the oblivion of sleep... and, to his surprise, he did. His body relaxed, the feeling of sleep descended upon his limbs, a heavy and warm lethargy. But his mind remained acutely, crystal clear awake. "Huh... very odd..." Ervin thought, the cognitive dissonance between a sleeping body and a hyper-aware consciousness making him feel profoundly disjointed. He shook his head, or rather, he felt the impulse to shake his head, and became aware that he was sweating far too much. A more logical, mundane explanation presented itself: maybe he was just severely dehydrated. That could cause confusion, couldn't it?
Clutching at this straw of normalcy, Ervin forced his physical self to stand up, intending to stumble to the kitchen for a glass of water. As he stood, swaying slightly, and moved to catch his water bottle, he saw something impossible in that persistent "other vision." A figure appeared within its frame, standing up from the bed. And that person was...
Himself.
He was seeing his own body from a point of view several feet away, as if he were a spectator in his own life, a camera mounted on the wall. He was observing himself through a separate, detached point of view!
"....WHAT?!" The shock was so visceral, so complete, that it shattered his tenuous control. His physical body, responding to the mental jolt, slipped on a stray shirt on the floor and began to tumble backward. "Ah wait no!" Ervin thought, the plea desperate and instinctive. Immediately, and without any conscious physical effort on his part, the version of himself that was falling in his "other vision" stabilized, his arms shooting out to balance, his core muscles engaging to halt the fall. It was an automatic, instantaneous correction that his conscious mind had not authored. "Woah! W-Weird!" he stammered aloud, the word utterly inadequate.
Trembling, he looked down at his own arms, moving them experimentally. Simultaneously, in his secondary field of view, he stared at the back of his own neck, at the stray hairs there that needed cutting, from a perspective no mirror could provide.
"H-huh?? My vision is... divided??" Ervin's mind raced, trying to categorize the experience. He was certain he must be hallucinating, a symptom of some severe mental or neurological breakdown... and yet, he didn't feel unwell. He didn't feel feverish or nauseous or dizzy in the conventional sense. In fact, aside from the shock, he felt alarmingly energetic and clear-headed right now, which made the entire situation even more confusing. So.... what was happening??? There wasn't any great way of knowing what this was... actually, there wasn't even a bad way of knowing. He had no frame of reference whatsoever.
"...Do I need to go to the hospital?" The thought was accompanied by a cold wave of financial dread. He didn't even know if he had enough money for a basic consult. "Guess.... I can use a credit card..." he thought with a sinking heart. His credit card was already perilously close to its limit this month; he'd been counting on his next paycheck to cover the minimum payment. He didn't have enough money for a decent meal, let alone a series of expensive neurological tests. The prospect was utterly disconcerting, a health crisis layered on top of a financial one.
Seeking some semblance of normal routine to calm his nerves, Ervin quickly went to the bathroom to take a cold shower and wash off the nervous sweat. Throughout the entire process, he felt and controlled all his movements, but the experience was eerily distant. It felt less like he was moving his own limbs and more like he was issuing commands to a separate entity that then executed them with flawless precision. The sensation of the water on his skin, the touch of the towel as he dried off, the feeling of pulling on his clothes—all this information was reaching his brain, but it felt like data being transmitted over a weak signal, without the intimate, immediate quality of actual touch. Even when he was dressed, controlling his body felt far more... automatic. He didn't feel the conscious effort of moving his limbs; they just seemed to know what to do and did it, as if he were a passenger observing a highly competent pilot.
"...." Ervin was deeply unnerved. Had he somehow developed a bizarre form of brain cancer? Was this the precursor to a massive stroke? He ran through a list of terrifying possibilities, each one more financially catastrophic than the last. He absolutely did not have the money to afford treatment for any of those grave diseases. A grim, resigned realization settled over him: he was most likely going to die, and relatively soon. Strangely, the thought of death itself didn't scare him with any sharp immediacy; it felt just as distant and abstract as the sensations from his own body. It was a theoretical problem, not an imminent one. Refusing to linger too long on that bleak possibility, he decided action was better than paralysis, and he walked outside his home, hoping the fresh air would clear his head.
As he stepped out onto the sidewalk and the world opened up before him, Ervin stopped dead in his tracks, his jaw going slack. His personal, internal crisis was suddenly and completely dwarfed by a colossal, external one.
".....Where the fuck is this?...." Ervin stared, utterly dumbfounded, at the scenery outside his home. This... this was not his street. This was not his city. This was, he was certain, not even his home country anymore. The architecture was all wrong—the shapes of the buildings, the style of the storefronts, the signage. And the people milling about on the sidewalk all had distinct Asian facial features. It wasn't just vaguely foreign; it looked exactly, precisely like the sleek, vibrant Korean cities depicted in the manhwas he spent so much of his free time reading. The level of detail was overwhelming.
Thinking about it frantically, trying to grasp hold of his old life as an anchor in this sea of wrongness, a new terror seized him. What... what was the name of his previous country? What city had he lived in? The thought, once so simple and fundamental, now felt slippery, like trying to clutch smoke. A sharp, stabbing headache began to pulse behind his eyes the harder he tried to focus on the memory.
"D-Did I get kidnapped?" That seemed a sudden, frantic possibility. Maybe someone from his old company, someone who held a specific grudge against him, had contracted someone to kidnap him and dump him here in a foreign land. Was that the reason he had been so sweaty and disoriented when he woke up? Had he been drugged? To be honest, those two points didn't really connect in a logical way—kidnappers wouldn't typically leave him in his own apartment to wake up confused—but Ervin was far too nervous and terrified to notice the lack of sense in his own frantic thinking. His mind was grasping for any explanation, no matter how flawed.
"P-Police! I need to go to the police!!" Ervin talked to himself, the words a desperate mantra. He had to find authorities, someone in a uniform who could explain this, who could help him. And with that single, shaky plan forming in his mind, he began to run off, his eyes wildly scanning the unfamiliar signs and faces, trying to find a symbol, a building, anything that might indicate where the police station was, all while his mind reeled in a vortex of confusion, fear, and that strange, persistent double vision that now seemed like the least of his problems.