The first time was an accident.
He was lost somewhere, except it didn't really seem like a "where". He was nowhere, and nowhen. He didn't have a sense of his own body. There was only an empty expanse of nothing that contained his consciousness, and he wondered at it, trying to move his arms and his legs. It was like moving pockets of air though the void of space, which was quite impossible since he didn't have any limbs and this wasn't space.
This drifting…was this heaven? He was utterly alone. Except he had a sense there was something nearby. Before he knew what he was doing he went back. It wasn't a memory. He snapped back to the moment he'd arrived. There was a cone. It was flat, like it was drawn on a piece of paper, same way he was. He hadn't been flat before. He tried to raise his head and found there was no way to raise it, because the world was flat.
"I ought to be panicking." He didn't speak the words, they just were. Words and thoughts were as corporeal as he was, just as real. Instead of panicking he moved his flat arm to touch it to his flat head and rubbed it with one flat finger. He didn't feel hemmed in, didn't feel squeezed into this shape. He'd been transformed into a flat thing, just as when he'd first been teleported he'd been transformed into a nothing.
He bent his mind to the sensation he'd felt when he'd appeared in this state. It was like enfolding himself, like touching his prefrontal cortex to his cerebellum, like touching his chest to his spine and his heels to his toes. It was harder now that he was actually trying to do it on purpose. There was no time here, though, so though it took forever to accomplish it he managed to do it right away.
He was still nowhere, and nowhen, but at least he was something this time. He couldn't see, because there was no such thing, because sensing was a feeling that enveloped all of space and time and it was just him and an orange traffic cone in the entire universe.
Finding himself in a space and in a time took him by surprise. By now he'd becoming fairly adept at moving between nothings. He was near a cliff face. He wasn't on the cliff face, because he was still in a different dimension, but he was there. In a place. In a time. He looked at the cliff face with a detached sense of wonder. He'd been traveling with nothing but a traffic cone to anchor him to any sort of reality and for all of his wandering, he'd sort of forgotten there was anything else in all of reality. Or that there was such a thing as reality.
He went back into his little pocket, because it was safe and he was used to it. There was a time when places like cliff faces with vegetation and dirt and rocks had been familiar and even normal things for him to see, wasn't there? There was a time, in fact, that he moved forward through time and physically through spaces. What an odd thing to think about.
Except it wasn't so odd. He could remember it now. It was limiting, but it was more natural for a creature such as himself. Perhaps, knowing what he did now about space and time, he could return to this state of being at any point he should wish.
Right. He let himself return to the moment in time and the place where he had found himself before. He exited his pocket dimension and turned away from the cliff face.
"All right," he said. The cone settled onto the ground before him and he raised his medical scanner. He'd forgotten about it. He'd forgotten about his armor, too. For the longest period they had become unnecessary trappings of a mortal life, and though they had moved through his pocket dimension with him, he'd not given them a single thought. "All right," he repeated. "Medical officer Frank DuFresne, returning to the mortal coil." He took a breath, the first conscious breath he'd taken in his new existence, and took his first step forward.