This was why John didn't drink. This swirling, hazy, head-smashed-in-by-a-gold-brick sensation made a man wish he had a time machine so he could jump back to yesterday and slap some sense into himself about touching anything intoxicating. He was stiff and sore all over, like he'd either lost a barfight, had been tossed out on his head by a bouncer the size of a tank, or had fallen on his ass no less than twenty times as he stumbled about in a drunken stupor. If he went into work feeling like this, the first person he'd wind up shooting today would be himself, in order to put an end to his misery.

John's next train of thought, after wondering if the pain in his head would blind him if he tried opening his eyes, was trying to recall why, exactly, he felt like this. After all, he didn't drink. It was completely unfair of the world to leave him feeling like this when he hadn't even preceded it with a night of drunken reveling.

It was when he tried to stir, to stretch out the aching twists in his limbs, that he discovered a lot more was wrong with the world than him waking up feeling like he'd lost a round with King Kong. There probably wasn't a single soul in the whole of the Multiverse who couldn't recognize the almost bell-like jangling of metal chains, and that was when John realized the pressing weight he felt had nothing to do with an imitation hangover and everything to do with restraints.

His eyes shot open but everything was blurred and dark before his eyes. If not for the heavy coils of metal links weighing on his body, he might've thought he really was waking in the middle of the night with the granddaddy of all hangovers hammering the inside of his skull. Alternately staring and squinting at the darkness before him, yet unable to even tell which way was up, John attempted to rationalize his newfound situation.

I'm dreaming.

It was a brilliant, immediate, and the only logical deduction. John was a happy, friendly, everyday guy. He worked for the United Collective of Spheres, the governing force in his sector and tier of the Multiverse, and his life was very ordinary. He got up, went to work, subdued or shot anybody trying to upset USC peace and harmony, and went to bed with a smile on his face more often than a frown. He hung out with the guys, made nice with the girls, smiled at the kiddies who looked at him and his shiny uniform with awe and admiration, and probably would kiss the babies if anyone ever asked him to.

There were undoubtedly people out in the Multiverse who led lives of the sort where waking up in chains was normal, or at least an expected fear to watch out for. John was not one of these people. Perhaps if he was the Chief of Security, or even a Captain or Lieutenant, he'd worry about waking up in a situation like this, courtesy of the local mobsters, but John was just a grunt. He didn't even have a kinky girlfriend to lay the blame on -- not that he wanted one of this particular kink. Not if it was this painful.

I'm dreaming, he told himself again, waiting for that lucid revelation to dispel the gloom and wake him into the predawn light in his little bachelor's pad. I'm dreaming, and this is what I get for eating a "breakfast burrito" before bed.

But admitting to his poor choice in midnight snacks did nothing to usher him to wakefulness. The only thing that happened as he lay there, waiting, was that his eyes started to adjust to the darkness and the pain in his head and limbs started escalating towards unbearable. It was sort of like waking up, lying in bed for a while, then suddenly realizing you had to take a major piss -- just not so easily relieved by a mad dash to the bathroom.

At last John was able to decide he was on his back and that part of the weight pulling on him was gravity, so "up" was in fact the direction he was facing. The blurs above him condensed into a paneled ceiling and a gridwork of pipes visible where some of the metal panels were missing. He was stretched out along a grungy metal wall, his head in the corner, and that he could see this at all was due to a small, circular light above his head, up by the ceiling and sharing his corner. It was like a spotlight, but one whose dimmer seemed to be at the lowest setting between light and true dark.

He was chained up and lying on the floor. How was that for pleasant? It didn't even have the decency to be a clean floor. The metal tiles he could see when he turned his head and eyes to the right almost matched the panels overhead. They were also home to the missing sections of ceiling as well as jagged chunks of unidentifiable debris. He smelled metal, predictably, and also rust and stale air. The pitiful spotlight gave off a dying, brownish light that tinted the empty room like an ancient photograph.

All together, the scenery told John that he had absolutely no clue where he was. An old storage compartment on a spaceship? An ancient laboratory closet? A stripped-bare miniature morgue? That, at least, suggested the surreal landscape of a dream, but everything else he sensed told him more and more that he was, in fact, awake.

"...the fuck?"

The sound of his voice, a tired croak, was dreadfully loud. Outside of the rattling the chains had made when he first shifted, the tiny room was dead silent. The spotlight that was his only company didn't even hum. John didn't like it at all. He lived in a world where even "quiet" was upset by some subtle sound. Usually it was the hum of passing speeders or hovertrans drifting overhead, but nothing was ever truly silent.

He had to be dreaming. This was too unreal to be real, no matter how well he was dreaming the aches and pains of immobility and a headache that didn't want to fade. But real or not, John was literally tired of taking it lying down.

He tried to prove he was lucid-dreaming by willing away the chains, to no effect. All he got for the trouble of concentrating was a bolt of pain between his brows. Blinking away the stars that swam briefly before his eyes, it was then that John discovered that a discoloration on the wall over his head was more than just a rust-stain.

Unless rust-stains now came in shapes reminiscent of ancient skeleton keys, that was.

I am dreaming! John thought with relief. He came from a very sane world, after all, and in sane worlds people did not wake up chained to the floor with keys hanging on bolt an inch or two from their faces. There were countless Tiers in the Multiverse, and John never wanted to visit an insane one.

So provided this dream was methodical in its madness and his subconscious wasn't just expressing some metaphor on frustration towards his life, a dangling key meant there was a lock nearby, and John bet it was somewhere on the chains.

Well. If he wasn't going to wake up and his dream was going to insist on paining him, then it seemed he might as well play along with it until he woke up.

Carefully lifting his head, so as not to overly disturb the headache nesting in it, John took an actual look at his situation with the chains. It turned out they were very thick chains, looped and crisscrossing around and over his body at random. He was so stiff and sore in part because the chains held him immobile -- legs together, hands at his crotch, elbows to his sides -- and in part because his own weight pressed on the chains wherever they looped under him.

It looked like a forgotten magician's trick rather than a chained cocoon, as John could see his clothes. For some reason, he'd dreamed himself in his uniform, with its snappy dark green fabric and silver buttons. As John attempted to shift about, a sliding chain caught one of the buttons and snapped it off, sending it spinning out across the floor with a little metallic tinkle.

I dream in detail, John observed briefly. He then found he was only chained to himself. Shifting his weight around pushed him away from his wall and corner, nothing tugging on him to say he was chained to the floor or walls in any way.

John turned his head back towards the key, caught it between his teeth, and pulled it off the protruding bolt its circular head dangled from. The taste of rust and filth he then discovered was so shockingly foul that he jerked his head to the side and spat the key away without thinking, gagging. He heard the key clatter away the same way his button had done, but this time the lucid detail was anything but amusing.

Never in his life had John tasted something so unclean.

For some strange, inexplicable reason, that disgusting, rancid tang shocked him back to reality. Not the reality of the waking word, but the reality of his situation. Wherever this was, however he'd ended up here, it was no dream.

John stared at the dim room around him with new, awakened eyes, fighting down a wave of fright. His mind tried to run off in all the expected directions -- where was he, how had this happened, why was he here -- but he forcibly reined it back in. He was USC Security. You couldn't panic in that line of work, not even if you were just a grunt.

But though he pushed aside the wheres and hows and whos, he led one other remain as a goad: the whos. He hadn't chained himself up. Someone had put him here. His headache now told him he'd probably been drugged and only now was he shaking off whatever stupor it had put him in. His bewildered thoughts were just a single point of clarity in a mind still full of ache and haze.

Well, one thing was still clear. He didn't want to still be chained up when that who made itself known.

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