The man crawled through the burning sand. The heat was unbearable. The granules of sand stung his eyes and clogged his throat.
Five days.
Against all odds, he had survived five deplorable days in this inhospitable place. After the long hours of endless heat, he could no longer walk, but the one thing that kept him crawling was hoping beyond all hope that someone would find him. When he started, he wondered what his goal was. Nothing mattered now.
The dying man continued slowly in his arduous trek across the desert.
"One more," his mantra said.
One more what? Step? Push? Breath? Even he himself did not know, but one more is all he needed.
One more hill of the maniacal sand.
One more hour of heat and sand.
Pushing himself to the peak of that hill led the man to see a hallucination.
An oasis in the desert.
Not believing his eyes at the trees and water, the man gasped. Or tried to, as he could not do much of anything at this point. He started towards it, and, in his heat addled brain, could not fathom why he thought it was going to disappear. As he got closer, it did not disappear, but instead, changed shape.
It no longer looked like a pool of refreshing water surrounded by shade and fruit trees. Instead, it looked like a building with a yellow sign on it, not that he was in any shape to read the sign. If he was, he would have read "DOLLAR GENERAL".
What a cryptic message he would then have to decode, had he read the sign, but he could not, in fact, read the sign.
The man finally made it to the doors of the establishment. His tired arms and hands worked together to push open the door. A cool rush of air greeted him, and he was reminded just how hot the desert actually was. Crawling through, he carefully stood up on weak legs, and they were his legs. They were not just some legs he happened to find on his unfortunate journey through this inhospitable place. He took a few tentative steps through the sand piled up inside the door of the store.
No one seemed to be there. Then again he was half blind due to the sand.
A voice spoke up from somewhere in front of him, "Hello? Can I help you?"
The man's eyes widened painfully as an employee stepped into sight.
More importantly however, they focused on a nondescript, white, styrofoam cup that appeared to contain a liquid that sat in the young man's hands.
The former Atheist turned neo-Buddhist, turned Methodist Christian, turned Satanist, turned Nondenominational Christian, turned Muslim, currently Agnostic, man moved quickly towards the employee and reached for the drink, startling said employee and making him stumble back.
Because of this, some of the precious frozen liquid ended up spilling onto the nearby counter. The liquid on the counter ran over the edge onto the floor behind the register, frying all electronics as it went. The grape flavored liquid did not, in fact, have a mind of its own. If the grape slush did, it surely would not have done this, or perhaps would have said "sorry". But as it possessed no form of intelligence, it did not do either of these things.
As the man from the desert snatched the cup from the shocked employees' hands, the employee looked over the counter.
There were no electronics under the counter.
There was sufficiently advanced technology.
The employee looked to the man who just drank his slushy so fast he made himself sick, then out the doors which now no longer showed the desert, but a black void.
He had one thing to say, shaking his head, "I told them putting the door controller in the desert room was a bad idea."
The man did not respond, as he could not, seeing as his throat was dry and sore.
"I'm fired aren't I?"
(You can submit prompts if you want. There is no guarantee they will be done, but who knows?)