Something About Wormholes

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. To be fair, there weren’t always colonies of mushroom people in the forest or sentient scarecrows in the desert, either. If I remember correctly - and it’s getting hard to, I’ll tell ya - the dragons are the most recent, at least for this area, and they’ve been here for a few years.

As far as we can tell, there’s no set timeline or schedule for when things show up, or where. For instance, we haven’t had anything new in a while, whereas Hong Kong got flamethrowing wasps and anthropomorphic sharks within like six months of each other, so it’s kind of a crapshoot. It doesn’t help having no warning when something is coming in; I’ve only seen it happen once in person. I was about 15, a few years after my parents died, and one of the social workers assigned to me thought it would be good for me to see some family besides the grandfather I lived with, so they sent me off to Nebraska to visit my cousin’s family.

About halfway through my trip, my cousin (he was only a year or so older than me) and I were taking a walk through the cornfields by his parents’ farm. Ya know, because it’s Nebraska, and your options for activities are limited at best. There weren’t pathways, but we could always see the giant water tower right outside the farm, so we knew which direction to head in without getting lost in the fields that still towered over our not-impressively-tall teenage bodies.

We were about to head back to his house when we heard a thud that shook what seemed like everything. We froze, the corn swaying as if nothing was wrong at all, before turning to look around. Expecting to see nothing because of our obviously-bad circumstances for long-distance-catastrophe-gazing, we admittedly did not handle it well when we saw a split in….well, not the sky, exactly. Just a big tear in…I guess just…shit. I’ve never had to explain it before, everyone is just used to it now. Time space? The air? I dunno, just a rip. Maybe the sky. Either way we saw a giant hole where there definitely shouldn’t be one, and pouring out of it were what I can only describe as frogs - not dissimilar to the one from that weird cereal box - with presumably acid spit. I say this with uncertainty because I never actually saw the frogs spit on anything that melted immediately before we high-tailed it back in the direction of the farm, but I did catch a quick glimpse of a tongue-like object shooting out at a large tree in the distance and a whole limb subsequently smoking and falling right off.

Another thud, (significantly quieter than the first, I imagine because part of a tree crashing to the ground isn’t quite as earth shattering as reality literally breaking before your eyes), and we didn’t look back before we got to the edge of the farm, shrieking and trying to babble our way through what we saw to my aunt and uncle. They, probably reasonably, made us go inside; they had gotten used to this life quickly in the year or two since it had started. I think that’s why they moved to the farm in the first place. I haven’t been back to Nebraska since then, but we talk on the phone and catch up a few times a year. I believe they’ve only had a couple more rips nearby since then, so they’re doing okay considering.

I think the obvious biggest issue about all of it is the lack of knowledge.

Like I said, humanity’s best guess is that these tears are rips in time space; what we don’t know (along with the “when” and “where” and “what the hell’s gonna fall out this time” questions) is whether they’re opening to the past or future or different dimensions altogether. Not, I guess, that it really matters to us normal people, but it would still be nice to know.

We have established a few things since this started, at least. For one, it seems to be primarily apex predators coming in. The mushrooms might be an exception, but….hm. Ya know, if I remember correctly, they’re supposed to emit some gnarly, fast-acting poison clouds if you step on them, and they’re very hard to see, so…damn. I guess the mushrooms have one up on us too.

Every now and again we’ll get a person. That’s always weird. Far as I know it’s only happened a handful of times, and they’ve usually either been not friendly, or we’re unable to communicate with them, so it hasn’t been terribly helpful.

Sometimes instead of - or in addition to - dropping insane things on us, the rips leave us with changes to the geography. That’s REALLY weird.

This particular aforementioned valley was still green, for instance, but that’s more than can be said for some other valleys. I visited Ireland a few years ago and found their beautiful, sprawling green hills to be…considerably more purple than I was expecting. Which, don’t get me wrong, is nice and all, but it’s a lot harder to appreciate pretty purple hills when you’re expecting green, and you don’t know if some sort of cyborg penguin monster is going to drop from the sky and blast you in the face with laser vision.

All I’m saying is the unexpected beauty of this nonsense still just winds up being a really brutal reminder that things are not quite right.