The Timefarer: Shattered Steel

Your life up to this point had been one of the mundane, defined by years of schoolwork, porn and teenage angst embroiled into a hopeless romantic young male virgin with no purpose in the future. At nineteen years of age, you fear becoming a NEET, a manifestation of the average internet gamer soiled by society and destined to become a 'wizard' by forty.

One insignificant day, you had decided to take a different route, a walk through the abandoned strip mall that cuts in parallel to the route you usually take coming home from school. An alley of dead shops and establishments made their eerie presence known immediately, a sort of silently unnerving yet beautiful world of its own, lit up by the breaching rays of sunlight from the open decaying sunroofs.

With each careful step you take into the darkness that encroached around the bright rays, you heard the crunch of glass and debris, litter strewn across the tiled floorings of this once-bustling haven of commerce. Prada, LV, Giordano, Uniqlo... Even Toys R' Us lived on as rustic signposts degraded but still readable. Aisles upon aisles lain empty with naught an item that hasn't been pilfered. The escalators on the way, now still and motionless.

In the day, the sunlight creates a calming place, a tunnel of Zen that offered you a shortcut to your house through the freeway, an odd construction choice that stemmed from the retail bloom of the early 90's. It was a relatively well lit path, one of which you had promised yourself to attempt to navigate alone for a long time coming.

You made your way halfway through, a straight line path from entrance to exit, until you heard a noise emanate from your left. You stopped dead in your tracks, flicking your torchlight around as its beam pierced the abyssal darkness of the restaurant beside you.

"Uh... Hello?" you asked softly as you gripped your backpack's strap nervously.

"He-Hello?" you increased your volume to no response.

..

...

You felt a sudden compulsion, a primal need to check out the source. Despite centuries of evolution, your survival instincts screaming at you against this decision, you made several methodological steps towards the kitchen where the noise came from. It was a weird noise, one that sounded like metal grinding on metal but without the screeching annoyance that came with it.

"Hello?" you asked again like the dumbass you are. "Anyone here?" your torch flickered its beam for a moment.

Your eyes drifted subconsciously to the sink, as if commanded by some unseen superior . Within the metal sink laid a cube, an odd cube that took you about minutes of staring at it frozen in place to even comprehend a shred of what it was. It resembled a tesseract, a four-dimensional hypothetical cube, a three-dimensional representation of it. Originally dark and lightless, the cube seemed to notice your presence, as it begun to light up through intricate carvings on its shell that emitted bright blue radiance that mesmerized you.

With a nagging compulsion, you reached out a hand as you dropped your torch, until the tip of your index finger felt the cold smooth surface of the cube.

Then you blacked out and fainted like the little bitch you are.