Walking down the street, I found myself wrapped up in that fog that comes from taking the same route I've gone down a million times prior, it being so familiar you don't even need to process your path.
Wonder if anything interesting will ever happen around here, probably not though. I'm right in the middle of boring suburbia, a damn block party would be considered too much of a disturbance around here.
As I continued on my walk back home from my job at some random new fast-food chain that managed to not shut down, yet also had a position that wasn't filled by some other resident of this town scrambling for any scrap of money to get out of here, I stumbled onto something equal parts exciting, and just plain strange. A new store.
The sign on top of the honestly quite bland brick building labels the mystery establishment as Arlington's Mirror Emporium of Wonders. An antique store here had no place being in business as anything other than a front for the mob or some eccentric rich guy pursuing some hobby, so either way, I'll get something interesting out of a short stop in this place.
Not like I have anything better to do, or anyone waiting for me. I might as well go into the suspicious mirror store. Just hope I don't leave rolled up in a carpet.
The store's entrance isn't anything particularly spectacular. It's just your run-of-the-mill brick building, nothing out of the ordinary for an older small business around the northeast. The words on the roof do stick out though, with the lettering denoting the Mirror Emporium of Wonders being made completely out of mirrors. As for its entrance, it looked more like the door to someone's old house than that of a business. Pulling open the door took quite a bit of effort, as the door was a heavy mass of wood, rather than the easy-to-open glass doors most stores. Even the century-old doors of some of the ancient restaurants around here paled in weight to this stone slab masquerading as an entrance. Finally heaving it open, I walked through the portal and into the store. The inside was flat out just not what I expected.
"How on Earth does this even exist?"
The floor of the building, rather than being wood, or carpet, or concrete, or something resembling a floor, is a complete, perfect reflection of the store above, somehow excluding myself. This was either some very rich guy's side-project or some remnant of the five families. I decided to look around a bit, out of interest in the unique and wondrous mirrors of course, the weird physics-defying floor has nothing to do with it!
I'm still stuck between booking it out of the store before I run into the proprietor, or finding them and getting either an extremely interesting or unbearably boring discussion about mirrors. However, given that the floor seems to be made by wizards, I might as well stick around and find the guy running the place. Hopefully my mafia joke prior doesn't end up being a reality. Although from the looks of it, I'm more likely to come out of this place as a frog than in a carpet.
After a few minutes of searching around this strange, mirror-filled store, I finally stumbled upon what looked to be the only other person in the store, sitting behind a desk, bored out of their mind. Rather than the old, bearded man I imagined would run a mirror shop, the actual person in the store looks like someone the other guy would claim is destroying society. The only particularly ordinary thing about him was his shirt, a blue button-down. I couldn't spot the rest of his outfit though as he was seated behind a quite massive, probably very old desk. The light blue shirt brought attention to a much more eye-catching part of the man though, his hair. It was pastel pink. Not only was his hair pink, his eyebrows were too, making it almost seem as if it was his natural hair color. While that's a bit uncommon, his eyes were just downright bizarre.
"Woah, you wearing some kind of contacts or something?"
I couldn't really stop myself from asking, even if it's rude. I mean, it's not every day you see someone with eyes that don't even clearly show their pupils, much less have such a strange merging quality to them.
"Bout time someone walked in here. So, you there, Jules. Yes or no?"
The man's voice sounded, frankly, ridiculous. It sounded closer to someone faking someone else's accent than the way someone actually talked.
"Wai- wh- sure. But how do you know my name?"
"Ey! Giratina, that's good enough for me! Now move it! Being human's a pain in the ass. I can't even float!"
Still a bit too focused on the man's strange appearance and even more ridiculous accent, I nearly missed him randomly yelling at the sky. What I didn't miss was the fact that every mirror in the building had some strange black fog starting to spin out of the center of it, darkening most of the surfaces around me, and having absolutely no real-world counterpart to show where the fog is coming from.
"What the hell is going on here? You, pink guy, whatever your name is. Is this some TV set or something? Why are the mirrors going dark!"
Rather than answer the frantic questions I started flinging at him in my panic, the strange pink-haired man chose to just start laughing right at my face."
He continued to do so for quite a while actually, with it taking basically all my self-control to not grab him by the collar and shake the answer out of him. All the while the dark fog continued engulfing the previously reflective surfaces of the mirrors, now pitch black.
"Well Jules, you agreed to it. Time for you to meet someone even more bored than me!"
And with that, Arlington's Mirror Emporium of Wonders, a building that hadn't been there six hours ago, vanished to who knows where, taking one man, and one "man" with it.