A/N: Welcome, everyone, to my new fanfic. I've wanted to do something like this for several months, since I first discovered the Backrooms by way of Kane Pixels' "Found Footage" videos on YouTube…definitely check them out if you haven't already, they're amazing.
If you're not familiar with the Backrooms, they're some sort of alternate dimension that you can access by accidentally "noclipping" out of reality – passing through a solid object and ending up transported across spacetime. They're made of a large (possibly infinite) number of different levels (at least according to the canon I'll be using for this fic) that you can pass between by "noclipping" through different points in the levels. And the levels are also filled with lots of different deadly creatures called "entities."
On second thought, maybe you should just look it up. This explanation doesn't really sum it up that well in hindsight. It's a pretty hard topic to try and write a concise description of.
Also, if there's any preexisting Backrooms levels (or ideas that you have for new ones), let me know and I'll be sure to incorporate them into the story.
Anyway, without further ado, here's the first chapter. Read, review, and enjoy!
I do not own Marvel or the Backrooms…which I'm not sure any one person owns to begin with.
Yellow.
Everything was so yellow.
The walls, the ceiling tiles, the damp carpet…all of it.
Nebula stood up and grabbed one of her batons from her belt. The recess lights in the ceiling hummed loudly, like too much electricity was flowing through them and they were about to burst. At the far end of the bare room she was in, two halls branched, one to the left and one to the right. She turned around, and saw that at least three more halls and rooms were linked to the opposite end of the room she was in.
And all the paths looked the exact same: yellow everything, buzzing lights, no furnishings of any sort.
"Hello?" she called. "Quill? Mantis? Drax? Where are you?"
The grating hum of the lights was the only answer.
Where had she even been before this place? She knew the rest of the Guardians had been there, that they'd taken the Benatar somewhere. Thor and those godforsaken screaming goats weren't with them anymore, so they'd gotten back to searching for Gamora, and…anything recent was just…fuzzy.
Nebula took her universal locator device from the pocket in her jacket. She turned it on. The screen only showed a mess of yellow static. More damn yellow.
Wherever she was, there must have been some sort of shield around it that stopped any incoming or outgoing electric signals. So all she knew was that somehow she'd been separated from the rest of the team and ended up in this place.
Well, nothing to do but head in as close to a straight line as she could manage and hope to find a way out. This place couldn't exactly go on forever.
She headed down one of the halls, and immediately realized that her situation was much worse than she'd initially thought. Three more doorways branched off from the sides of the hall, with no fewer than two paths coming from extending of those rooms. This place was a maze, and nothing she could see indicated which was led to the actual exit.
Even without her universal locator, she realized, she wasn't entirely helpless. If there was one thing she was grateful to have learned from her father, it was his attention to aspects of different races' cultures. Their social hierarchy, their festivals….
…and their architecture.
Granted, Thanos had always used this knowledge for his own means, to plan more effective attacks against planets, but Nebula had always paid attention anyway, just out of the desire to learn as much about different planets as she could.
And the more she wandered through it, the more the architecture of this damned maze reminded her of Earth. She hadn't seen much of it I the brief time she was on the planet after the Battle of Earth, but it stuck with her for how strangely primitive it was, given how many larger conflicts in the galaxy seemed to involve the planet.
The maze had Earth's fluorescent lights in the ceiling, that strange substance called "wallpaper," and most of all, the occasional power sockets in the walls. No other planet she'd ever seen had the arrangement of two rectangular holes and one circular one in a power socket that she'd seen on Earth.
So how had she ended up on Earth, and what was this structure she was in?
Then again, she had heard about these strange things called "corn mazes" and "escape rooms" that they had on Earth. It seemed Earthers actually liked getting lost or trapped inside places and having to find their way out. She shook her head in wonder. Maybe this was something like that, and she'd just happened to land inside it.
"Is anyone here?" she called.
She lost track of how long she'd been in the maze. Half an hour? Hours? A day? No windows meant no sense of a circadian rhythm. And any attempts to remember where she had been before coming here were inevitably thwarted by that never-ending buzzing. The lights were only sporadically placed throughout the area, leaving some areas dimly lit, but somehow the buzzing always sounded as though it was directly above her. The musty, humid smell of the carpet (of which she had yet to find one dry section) certainly wasn't doing her concentration any favors either.
The only thing that ever changed about the rooms was their shapes, but even that wasn't enough to make any of the rooms distinctive from the rest. Despite Nebula's attempts to stay traveling in a straight line, the monotony of the place made it all but impossible to be sure this was the case.
There was something else, too. The longer she spent in the maze, the more something about it just felt…off. Like there was something fundamentally wrong about the mere existence of the place. Its emptiness, maybe? Or was it something else? Something more…tangible, waiting for her somewhere in the depths of this yellow hell?
Just when she was positive the rooms would never be noticeably different from each other, she rounded a corner into a room without any doorways leading from it. Instead, the lone alternate exit was a tunnel through the wall, accessed by a crude wooden ladder leaning beneath it.
Nebula warily approached the ladder and looked through the tunnel. It was several feet long and led to another room that looked the exact same as all the other ones she'd been in. What sort of sick weirdo designed this place…and who the hell would find getting intentionally lost to be fun?
Earthers had problems.
She stowed her baton back in her belt and climbed the ladder. The inside of the tunnel was cramped, but not impossible to traverse.
When she was about halfway through, a clicking, clanking noise came from the rooms she had just left. She instinctively turned back and hit her head on the ceiling of the shaft in doing so. "Shit," she muttered. She didn't see anything beyond the back end of the shaft, but the opening didn't exactly provide her a panoramic view either. All she could see was the wall opposite the shaft and a small section of that eternally moist carpet. "Hello?" she called.
No answer came, nor did any other noises.
Maybe she hadn't heard anything after all, or maybe the sound had actually been some pest clambering around inside the wall. When several more seconds passed with no signs of life from behind her, she turned around again and continued crawling towards the far end of the tunnel.
She swung down to the floor, as there was no ladder below this side of the tunnel, and surveyed her surroundings. Same as on the far side of the tunnel, it seemed. Unending yellowness visible through the three other exits to the room.
A prickling feeling rose up the back of her neck and she whirled around, batons instinctively drawn. Nothing was there. The crackling of the batons' electricity blurred into the background of the humming lights.
Two words scrawled on the wall above the tunnel caught her attention.
NO ESCAPE.