» Phenomenon 25 3

Thud.

Bloom was hardly looking where he was going, he never really did, but even he knew that the second he hit the floor something was awry. One moment ago he had been with the rest of his team at the Ruins De Triomphe, and the next moment—assumedly after tripping on something—he was face first on something soft and squishy. He raised his head up slowly, detaching his face from the plastic screen of the hazmat suit, and got to his knees to try and understand quite what it was he fell on. To his surprise, however, everything around him was pitch black.

"Hello? Romaine?" He called in English but with a noticeable and thick French accent as he got onto his feet. He pushed his weight forwards into his toes, letting his boots press into the spongy material of the floor. It felt felt wet and moist, like a carpet in the small non-eviscerated towns to the south of South Paris. Bloom almost immediately tilted back and looked up at the sky, assuming immediately that he had somehow fallen through the floor of the street and wound up in some obscure basement. However, just like everything else, it was pitch black; there was no hole out into the overcast sky to return back to the surface.

Bloom sighed to himself, and reached to tap the shoulder of his hazmat suit to activate the light. It wasn't the sort of technology he was used to, back up at France Two he had much better equipment for common day-to-day usage. Needs required people back on Earth, though, and the pay was certainly good enough for such dangerous jobs. With a few flickers, the in-built torch for the suit activated and illuminated the ceiling in a wide beam of bright white light.

The ceiling looked just about as ancient as the inside of any pre-war building, though Bloom noted that it more resembled the types from the shops and warehouses in the more historic districts of former cities and towns. There was an obvious grid for ceiling tiles, but a great many of the plastic boards were missing and assumedly scattered across the floor. Above them was a series of pipes and cabling that was caked in vines and moss, some of it overhanging and growing around the metal frame the ceiling tiles would once sit in.

Bloom lowered his head confusedly, and pointed himself and his light to look dead ahead. Though the torch only gave him so much visibility, it was clear that he was stood in a surprisingly spacious basement. The actual room he was stood in seemed small, devoid of furniture apart from piles of debris and peeling yellow chevron wallpaper to reveal rotting wood and moss-covered stone underneath, but the three hallways that sprang from the room seemed to stretch far and connect to many other rooms.

"Are you guys nearby?" Bloom called out, doing a slow twist on his heel as he spoke to ensure that his voice was heard in every direction, as the speakers on such old suits did tend to be tinny and quiet. Upon getting no reply, Bloom fumbled with his hands nervously before resting them idly at his side, using the lack of a response as a reason to take initiative and begin walking in an attempt to leave the basement he had found himself in.

He didn't imagine it would take that long to find some stairs back to the surface.

---

Bloom tapped the corner of his hazmat suit's translucent plastic screen, displaying the time where he had touched. Despite how long his aimless walking had felt, it had only been half an hour. Bloom very rarely entered the basements of pre-war homes, he had been warned of the things that grow and the smell of the things that had died in them, supposedly potent enough to seep through the suit's filters and into the nose, but he at least knew basements were never so expansive. Most were one room, potentially two or three, and seldom connected to other basements. He was sure he was still in the same basement as he started too, as the aesthetic of each space was mind numbingly similar to the last. Basements weren't usually like that, Bloom supposed. Perhaps he was in the famous catacombs, they were underground. He wasn't sure, he wasn't born before the war, he wasn't around when it would've been common knowledge to know what a catacomb even was.

15:23

Three hours had passed on the dot, Bloom realised, although their time walking had felt much longer than three hours. Bloom had to assume that by this point he was in the catacombs, especially since he had spent the past thirty minutes walking in a straight line south without needing to turn back once. His initial estimations made him believe that the distance he'd travelled would have put him outside of Paris as a whole, but Bloom knew that can't have been right. Even if he'd heard that the catacombs were big, he knew they weren't that big.

If it wasn't for the fact that each room was rotted, moist, and overgrown in their own unique ways, Bloom would have sworn that he was going in circles, especially as the four hour mark of his entry into this basement came and went. By now, the light in his suit was starting to flicker, and Bloom made sure to curse under his breath at every little falter in the torch's electricity supply. He wasn't sure if the flickering was from poor maintenance of the outdated suits or general low battery, but knowing the incidents that these outfits had caused with others, he assumed it was a case of both.

After Bloom weaved his way through a strange series of parallel pillars taking up the entire room, he passed through a doorless doorway and into a hallway, feeling what he only assumed to be rainwater dripping on the top of his hazmat suit as he passed the threshold. If it wasn't for the fact that he looked down and recoiled as his foot squelched in a disgusting outcrop of mushrooms, he would have missed and fell down into the caping chasm inches ahead of him. He tentatively stepped forwards, leaning over to let the light on his shoulder illuminate the circular drop.

It descended for miles, it seemed, the soggy carpet of the basement curving with the perimeter of the hole and becoming the chasm's walls. It didn't look like it was a structural failing, but instead some odd yet intentional feature. The hole seemed bottomless at first, but when Bloom squinted he could see a faint glow of blue illuminated as a pin point speck. He couldn't tell if that was the floor of the hole or some item at the bottom of it, but obviously Bloom wasn't in the position to check. Instead, he skirted around the perimeter of the chasm and resumed walking.

By the time five hours passed, Bloom was beginning to worry. He had long abandoned his methodical routes, and was now pacing at a light jog in some desperate attempt to find a way back to the surface. His light was continuing to flicker, and worse yet the flickering was growing more constant. There were many times where he had collisions or near misses with walls or hanging debris from the ceiling because of extended periods of time where he was without any light whatsoever.

Bloom's walking had led him to a long hallway, seemingly with no doors or openings to other rooms along its length. Realising how his travels had become suddenly linear, Bloom slowed as his suspicions grew. He was not one to usually be paranoid, but being trapped underground and inside the most confusing architecture he had ever been in was certainly making him question everything he saw. His light flickered and died for the millionth time, and his frustrations with it distracted him from his surroundings and he found himself walking right into the wall. Bloom panicked momentarily, thinking that the hallway he had spent minutes walking down resulted in a dead end, but when he turned to his right he realised it actually just curved.

His suit's light was still inactive, but he could still see the way forwards through a strange illumination further down the hall. The blue light wasn't uniform, as the light seemed to be spilling through cracks like the cement in a wall, but it was noticeable enough through the pitch black ahead to catch Bloom's attention. He tapped his shoulder to try and make his light work again, but when that failed he took a deep breath in to steady himself and walked forwards towards the light.

As he approached, the image ahead began to get clearer, in part thanks to the blue light basking the walls in a glow of the same hue. However, while the vision in the distance was beginning to take shape, that didn't mean Bloom understood what it was he was looking at.

He slowed and stopped, looking down at the ends of his boots where the solid ground ceased. Ahead the hallway abruptly ended, and opened up into a strange but oddly beautiful vista. The basement's relatively solid construction abruptly ended in a series of cracks and breaks that worsened, with further parts of the hallway floating in front of where the hallway ended like segments of broken glass. Stranger still, the hallway and its shattered chunks all seemed to float in some strange sky, disobeying the laws of physics. Though the colour of the sky around Bloom was blue like Earth's, it was a much more vivid and deep hue, its uniform colour across wherever he looked feeling oddly disorientating. At least space had stars to orientate oneself. Squinting further into the blue, trying to see beyond a faint fog that seemed to permeate where the hallway was hovering, Bloom was sure he could see the other dilapidated rooms he had previously come from, as well as many more he had yet to reach.

Bloom looked directly up, hoping that this odd blue void was just some optical illusion and instead a large room painted a strange uniform blue. Perhaps, if he craned his head 90 degrees upwards, he would see a hatch to return him to the surface of the Earth. It did make some sense that this area may have a way to leave the odd space to Bloom, even if he struggled to put that justification into words. Bloom squinted again, hoping he could see through the fog a second time to some far off escape, but there was nothing of the sort.

His attention focused on the floating chunks of hallway ahead of him, and with some impatient determination to leave he tried to reach forwards and touch one, hoping to pull on it. Unless it was a Satellite Craft things didn't usually float, so Bloom assumed these chunks were being lifted and held in some form. He swiped at the air above a floating carpet and brick chunk, but his palm merely swiped through the oddly thin air and wrapped back around to his body. Ensuring he didn't lose balance from this swing and miss, he took a step back and found his footing, scowling with annoyance at the failed attempt.

After multiple swipes and attempted grabs at invisible strings all failed, Bloom tried a different approach. He got onto his knees, placing his non-dominant hand on the soggy floor and reaching his other out to try and touch the closest shard of hallway he could. Although he teetered dangerously close to falling into the abyss, his gloved hand made contact with a fragment of wood and plaster. He was successful at pushing it, but he failed to keep himself upright and fell onto his front, everything above his chest flopping over the threshold of the hallway. His eyes widened in horror at the void below him, and he quickly scrambled back from the precipice and onto his knees to look at the chunk he had just pushed.

What Bloom expected to happen was simple. If these chunks were held up by a wire, or multiple wires, from above, then pushing the chunks would cause them to swing in an arch. Depending on how high up the wires were and how far he pushed would determine the speed and width of the swing, but regardless the outcome would be the same. Instead, however, the fragment began to sail off, the momentum from Bloom's push causing it to pick up a corkscrewing spiral as it flew across the blue void in a frictionless descent. Within a minute, it was lost to the fog. Before Bloom drew any actual conclusions, he tore off a section of the carpet and crumpled it into a ball. He looked down at the precipice before his knees, and dropped the ball of wet mush over it.

This time, his new prediction went exactly as he expected it to. The ball fell into the void, maintaining maximum velocity as it, too, vanished into the blue haze of the equally blue sky around him. To try and get a sense of where it was going, Bloom rested his torso against the floor and pressed his face up to the screen of his hazmat suit to get as close of a look as he could, but either the fog was too great or the depth was too vast to see where it landed.

While he was on the floor, Bloom at least took the opportunity to try and see what was underneath the rooms. Part of him still hoped that there would be some kind of pillars or supports or something present underneath to make sense of the odd physics at play, but he wasn't surprised when he saw nothing keeping the 'basement' afloat. He hadn't seen any underneath the buildings in the distance, after all. He got back to his feet, cursed under his breath when he realised how far he would have to backtrack, and resumed his mindless wandering.

---

Bloom was starting to get hungry and sleepy. It had been a while now, and while he could easily check, he was starting to lose the energy to do just about anything. His light was beginning to malfunction more often than it wasn't, although at the present moment he considered that a blessing as it meant he didn't have to move as much and exude more energy he didn't actually have.

While passing from one side of a room to the other, his currently active flashlight gave another set of inconsistent flickers and died again, causing Bloom to stop in his tracks. He no longer had the energy to reach to his shoulder and angrily smack the light in an attempt to reactivate it. Frankly, he had no energy to even feel anger, and all he could do was awkwardly collapse to his knees from exhaustion.

Having at least some level of dignity for where he chose to collapse, Bloom twisted on one knee and flopped back into a section of the wall. The force of his fall caused the plaster behind his back to crack and cave in, but the Bloom-sized hole and the wallpaper hiding it provided a comfortable place to rest. At least, it was comfortable enough for someone who now found themselves without the willpower to get up.

Bloom's mouth was dry, his stomach felt empty, and his body felt less solid than the fuel used in the ships that brought him to earth.

All he could think about was home as he drifted to sleep.

Bloom could feel a light shining onto his closed eyelids, awaking him from a dreamless sleep. At first, he figured he was seeing the light of death, but his confusion over his own contentedness for that scenario snapped him out of that idea quickly. He opened his eyes wearily as his head slowly lifted from its slumped position. After opening his eyes even a slither, though, he quickly had to close them as his pupils focused on the origin of the illumination. From the brief glance, it appeared to come from a hovering mass of light about two inches above and in front of him, and when his eyes adjusted and he got a second look he confirmed that to be true.

Despite the fact that the light had no actual features or signals to show it was alive, Bloom still felt as though it had a gaze that was penetrating into his soul. Its light momentarily flickered, and its hovering in the air seemed jerky and trembly, like someone struggling to hold themselves up on a gymnastics pole.

"…Hello?" Bloom asked with a dry voice and cough, struggling to pinpoint how to give the odd orb eye contact. Looking into it directly felt as though as it would cause eye damage, and the sheen of its light on his plastic visor wasn't making it easy to look into its epicentre even if he wanted to. Bloom wasn't surprised when the orb didn't reply, but he was taken aback when the orb began to hover away to his right.

The light from the creature (or whatever it was) was bright enough to illuminate a great chunk of the room, and Bloom felt as though it was trying to lead him somewhere. He didn't have the strength to get up onto his feet, but he did find the willpower to flop awkwardly onto his stomach and begin a crawl to follow the ball.

Bloom was unsure just how long he followed the ball for, but he was at least certain that it wanted to be followed. Every time Bloom stopped to catch his breath or it disappeared around a corner, the orb seemed to stop and wait for him each time. In fact, when it did stop permanently, Bloom didn't even realise it wasn't waiting for him until he got close enough to it that staring directly made his eyes hurt. He shuffled back a bit, shutting his eyes and waiting for them to adjust again.

When they did, Bloom realised that this orb seemingly hadn't stopped for no reason. It was illuminating an odd square patch of the carpet, one that seemed darker than the rest. At first, Bloom believed it to be an area where water had cascaded and formed an even more gross concoction of fibres and fluid, but not only were there no marks in the ceiling for the water to have come from, but the area of dark floor was completely square.

"…Why have you led me here?" Bloom asked the floating orb, looking at it in some defeat. Just like the last time he had tried to communicate with it, the sphere was quiet. He thought for a moment that the orb tried to reply with a series of flickers, but the randomness of said flickering made him quickly realise this wasn't the case. Out of options, and still feeling as though the orb was trying to show him something, Bloom tentatively reached forwards and touched the odd grey carpet, feeling as though it was the only thing he could do in his weak state.

When Bloom's fingers brushed the surface, he didn't feel the soggy carpet fibres and ingrown mould. Instead, it seemed as though he felt nothing at all, as his hand passed right through the material. His eyes widened in shock, staring at his wrist as it brushed effortlessly through the carpet like water. Worried, he tried to pull his hand back through the non-solid matter, only to find that he couldn't.

"What's going on?" Bloom asked the orb in an alarmed tone, continuing to try and pull himself out. The orb never replied, of course, but Bloom was too focused on freeing himself to care. He got to his knees, but the increased force from using his leg muscles did not free his hand even slightly. Exhausted, Bloom slumped forwards, screaming as he suddenly found himself falling through the dark carpet in its entirety.

---

Bloom's memory was cloudy. One second he was somewhere, somewhere dark, somewhere dank, somewhere underground. No. Not underground. It seemed underground, but it was actually in its own unique atmosphere. Space. Void? He was certainly in some kind of void now. Things were dark, but strangely warm. There was a weight on his back, the back of his head, and something on his right arm. The darkness felt oddly comforting wrapped around his body, he was happy to let it envelop him permanently.

With a sudden sputter and choke, Bloom found himself abruptly waking up and launching himself forwards. He hacked up some liquid that had hit the back of his throat, which tasted warm and had the texture of soup, but had a completely alien taste to it.

"Oh, I'm sorry! I thought that would work-" A voice said. Bloom looked to his left, gasping in surprise and almost recoiling backwards until realising he was being kept in place. He found himself staring at the face of a young looking woman, looking down at him with a concerned and surprised look on her face. she removed her arm from around his body, and allowed him keep himself propped up on what seemed to be a bed mattress. Bloom glanced around and realised he was inside some claustrophobic space made of wood, poles, and some kind of stretched leather and fur; an odd portmanteau between the old style of camping tents and those tribal tipi's from even older cartoons.

"…What?" Bloom asked, rubbing his head. Upon seeing his skin and his basic bodysuit on his arm, he shouted in panic, looking back to the woman who was knelt at the bed he strangely found himself on.

"Oh shit, oh shit, where's my-"

"Your hazmat suit? Don't worry about it, y-you don't need it down here. It's in storage."

"But this is Paris, I've been told about just how many times it was hit, the-the radiation is dangerous even I'm wearing my suit! Why aren't you wearing a suit??"

"Because," The woman started, speaking gently with Bloom, sounding surprisingly old despite the fact she looked to be in her 20's, "this isn't Paris."

"Then where are we? Am I back in the countryside?"

The woman chuckled. "Not quite." She pulled back from Bloom, setting the bowl she was holding on a bedside table that he assumed contained the soup that had woken him up abruptly from his peaceful silence.

"Then where am I? Please, I… I don't want you to play games. It's been over a day and I want to go back to the surface."

"Well… I'm sorry, but I can't do that. I'm afraid you're here forever."

"What-??"

"Please, don't panic! I've had this talk before with people, hold your thoughts for just a few moments."

"I… Okay, okay. Frankly I don't feel like I have a choice."

"Yeah, sorry. You weren't in a good state when we found you. L-Lay back, I don't know how long this will take for you to believe me."

Although reluctant, Bloom began to lower his head to try and get comfortable. His head sank back into a surprisingly comfortable pillow, almost more comfortable than the ones back home. The woman watched him, pulling up a chair from the end of the room and placing it at the side of the bed.

"Right, um… I'm going to assume at some point yesterday you… tripped, right? In 'Paris', I presume. Yeah?" The woman asked, leaning back into the chair.

"I… Yeah, I did. Near the Ruins De Triomphe."

"And I assume after you tripped, you found yourself in a pitch black series of rooms? All abandoned and shit?"

"I thought I'd fallen into a basement…"

"Oh, you're not the first to think that! No, this is… this is worse. What made you think it was no longer a basement?"

"One of the hallways I was in looked very… shattered. The chunks were floating like they were in space, they sort of were in space. If space was… blue. Does that sound dumb?"

"No, no!" The woman said endearingly with a genuinely entertained chuckle, shaking her head. "That's what this place is. It's… think of it like an entirely new universe, and those abandoned rooms were one of infinite planets. You're in another one now. W-We call them levels, and the blue universe that holds them is 'The Backrooms'."

"The… 'Backrooms'." Bloom repeated, giving the woman a confused look.

"Yeah! I don't come from Earth, we call that the 'frontrooms', but from how I've had it described the Backrooms exists outside of the universe you came from. It also sort of… replicates it."

"Really? Why?"

"Oh, god knows!" The woman said with another laugh, "But it does, all the levels, as we call them, replicate what's on Earth, the Moon, and Mars. They're the insides of buildings, fields, voids… concepts, drawings, mental projections sometimes. Anything to do with humans has some weird counterpart here."

"And how long has this place existed?" Bloom asked, beginning to sit up.

"Oh, since forever. Long before I was born. Hell, I'm sure it's existed for hundreds of thousands of years. The older levels can evolve to make sure they don't look too antiquated, unless being old is, like, their thing. Sometimes it is."

"…Huh. Wait- does that mean-"

"Yes, yes it does. I know what you're gonna ask. Before everything got all… destroyed and irradiated… The levels replicated the world pre-fuck-up."

"…Oh wow. Did warheads hit the, um, levels? As you call them?"

"No, um… Okay, it depends. Some places may have done, but for most levels, everywhere evolved in an instant, changing from pre-bombs to post bombs like… like that." The woman explained, her tone slowly dropping and ending her sentence with a click of her fingers. "Before it all happened, I lived in level that was a city for miles and miles and miles… Um, by complete luck, I just missed it turning into a flaming hellscape. It's different now, but… No one in it survived. I lost everyone."

"Oh… Oh my god. I-I'm sorry." Bloom said, the woman's description somehow making him feel more empathy and upset than the hundreds of stories he'd heard from the earth natives he'd bump into on his expeditions.

"Oh, it's okay!" She said, putting on a smile as her voice returned to its usual pitch.

"Is it? I… I imagine that happened recently, right? Did the evolution take a few years to catch up? You look my age."

"Oh, right! Um… okay, one other thing of note. People age… slower in the Backrooms. No idea why, everyone's different with it, and it only affects adults. I was 16 when it went to hell, and I assume shit happened in 2112 back on earth, right?"

"…Yeah, it did. Why do people age slow here…?"

"Oh, no idea. The Backrooms does a whole lot of weird shit that honestly you just have to take in stride sometimes."

"You mean like weird balls of light guiding you to dark carpets you can't touch? Do I just have to accept that at face value too?" Bloom asked with an entertained chuckle.

"Oh! Right, god, I haven't even explained Entities and Noclipping. There's a lot to inform you of, there always is with newbies. H-Here, get out of the medical ward and I'll show you around." The woman offered, presenting her hand at the same time. Bloom took it with a smile, and got himself out of the bed with her help and a subsequent stretch.

The woman led Bloom out of the tent through a buttoned up tent flap, and the view outside was enough to shock Bloom. The place the odd tent was built in was another indoor level, and another that was completely pitch black in its natural state. The ceiling looked to be made of damp and mould-covered concrete, however, with a series of rusted pipes along the ceiling and a concrete pillar built a few meters ahead. Hooked onto the pillar were oil-lit lanterns, burning and illuminating the local area. Those, in conjunction with other lanterns held either on wooden posts or other pillars, lit what looked to be a small town with a mix of tents and actual structures made of various scrap materials. What was more shocking to Bloom, too, was the abundance of people milling around, passing both him and the woman he woke up with.

"Oh! Oh wow… I… I thought I was alone. I thought we were alone. It was so empty on the other level."

"Many places are empty, um… Especially now, after what happened, but people tend to find people when they need to. This community has been around since the bombs, so a lot of people come here."

"Right… and where is it? Does the level have a name?"

"It has many! We used to have a database from far before the war, but it didn't survive very long after it. But… it's still very well known as Level 1. Where you came from is Level 0."

"Huh… strange name. Definitely sounds like a name from a database."

"Hah, I know right?" Aether said with a chuckle, with Bloom reciprocated.

"Still, um, I'll use it! Oh, shit, what's your name by the way?"

"Oh, sorry! That completely slipped me by. I'm Aether, what about yourself?"

"Bloom."

"Nice name! I like it. C'mon, I'll show you around and explain whatever I can." Aether said invitingly, tilting her head to the right and down one of the streets. Bloom, despite his inner nervousness, nodded curiously and followed when she began to move, disappearing into the streets of the city.