Darkness.
Everything was shrouded in darkness.
It was like standing in a black void with only the images that your mind made up to keep you company.
Phil found himself lost in this void, all alone, yet this time, he didn't even have a kind of odd hallucination to accompany him.
He frowned, confusedly, as he focused on nothing in particular.
There wasn't really anything to focus on, actually.
It was dead silent, too, so there wasn't even any sort of sound to hear, either.
Even though it was practically a void around him, Phil still saw the blackness as pulsating, oddly, as if it were alive, yet of course it wasn't and couldn't be.
Phil didn't even feel that confused, he just felt a bit… wibbly.
'Wibbly' was definitely the word he was looking for.
It was after he'd started to relax a bit that he started to hear something, like soft voices talking to each other.
This… void… was beginning to feel more like a room. It started to change shape, becoming narrow and long and even narrower and even longer and the walls started to close in but the infinite length of strange whiteness remained and all sense of perception melted away.
Phil narrowed his eyes and tried to make out the end of the tunnel he was seeing, but it felt more like it was inside his eyes rather than around him.
His thoughts were snapped away from the tunnel as a loud sound burst out of nowhere like cymbals and people yelling violently loud and a train that felt like it was inside his head.
Phil span around, tensely, as some unidentifiable yet huge object, much like a boulder, came crashing out of the darkness and rolled past, seemingly only centimetres from his face.
He stepped back, stunned, but the noise didn't last long, as it suddenly disappeared in a blanket of deafening silence like a vacuum.
Some sort of thin thing sprouted up then as if to try and be of comfort – an innocent flower that grew out of the ground where the boulder had rocketed past – but of course this tiny blade of grass could do nothing to help if that huge object was to return.
Phil sighed, loudly, as a voice appeared and attempted to console him. It sounded familiar, but it wasn't really speaking discernable words, but more alike a mumbling drone.
It didn't help.
It didn't need to, though, as it was at that moment that things started to appear, fading into existence and materialising like a hologram.
Phil breathed a sigh of relief as he saw objects around him.
A proper room of things of which he recognised, fuzzy images of furnishings like sofas and rugs and a purple drinks bar and many chairs of different colours surrounding a white table.
His heart beating furiously, Phil leaned on this table and stared, cynically, at the strange device on top of it. He knew what it was but he also didn't know what it was at the same time.
"Why do I even put up with you?"
Phil swallowed and turned, sharply, to the left where he was met with the hazy of someone he knew very well. They didn't seem pleased with him, or at least from the manner in which they spoke; Phil couldn't really make out a face.
"Dan?" He asked, under his breath, "What are you doing? I thought we were friends-"
He didn't know what he was saying, and it didn't really feel like he was saying it, either. The words just seemed to float out of his mind instead of going out through his mouth.
"Clearly not anymore; I've catered to you long enough…"
Something about this seemed familiar.
Phil didn't really have time to process anything before he was being shoved backwards with what seemed like an unstoppable force into the sharp corner of the table behind him.
"What was that for?" He wheezed, falling to his knees and putting a hand over the right side of his face, even though it didn't really hurt.
It just seemed like it should have hurt.
"I'm leaving."
"Wait! Dan! No!" He whimpered, picking himself up, "You can't just leave me!"
"Can't I? Well, that's what I'm doing, so I'll see you around," the figure said, angrily, before storming off to the front door and swinging it open.
Phil's reaction was delayed until it was too late, but, wiping away what might have been either tears or blood, he gave a scared yell of,
"WAIT!"
He panted from exhaustion and bit his lip.
"Come back, Dan, I can't do this on my own… I… I- I NEED you-"
But of course it was too late and he was left on his own again.
He knew what this was; he'd been here before.
"My keys. My house keys: I lost them."
"What?" Phil choked, "Pardon?" And he gazed around to identify the source of the voice.
"I'm going to ask everybody, I just came to you first."
"I haven't seen them. Are you only just coming home?"
"Yes," the owner of the voice nodded. They were bleary and yellow as the sun, almost bright enough to burn straight into your eyes. It's too easy dealing with this girl in yellow dress – he'd sorted these problems before and didn't feel up to dealing with them again.
Phil frowned and turned away. He didn't want this right now. It had been a long time since the party and the room was in a mess.
The three queens of painful encounters he envisioned in his mind. It seemed he couldn't find a place to hide.
It was all down to people with names begging with E.
Erica.
Eliza.
…Esummer?
There was a fish tank on the table that shattered before his eyes and the water burst out and formed around him, drenching him so every inch was soaked.
Flowers and wine sat beside the shattered glass.
Everything's fine.
Feeling the water run down his spine, Phil stared to the rug and looked at the lines.
The stripes over it pulsated one at a time, growing and shrinking and widening and thinning.
It was Outré, certainly.
That seemed familiar, too.
Blinking the water from his eyes, he shakily turned around and searched for anything to be of comfort to him, but found none, so wandered towards the room he'd been sleeping in for the past few nights.
He didn't really walk to it.
The room seemed to come to him, instead.
Not even this place could be of any help as a swelling heat rolled through the air and washed over everything so that any object or wall was hot to the touch.
Phil squinted to the walls that fell away and the floor melted beneath him and he found himself falling, but not really falling, more like floating, that he expected would go on for days and that was something he really had an issue with because he didn't want to stay in the house with all the weird things, but he didn't fancy suffocating, either.
Only, the fall didn't last days, and in actual fact only lasted seconds, until he awoke in a cold sweat, wrapped in a blanket that he could feel rub against his skin and send another wave of sweltering heat over him.
As he flickered his eyes open and his suspicions that he had been dreaming were proved true, he saw a hand fall, gently, beside him, and he reached out to touch but it faded too soon and a feeling of panic set in and he couldn't spit out the words in his head and they only came out in awkward chokes and coughs and wheezes and-
"Da- DAN-" he rasped, eventually, as loud as he could, but even though it was supposed to come out as a cry, it was more on the tone of normal – even if slightly slurred – speech.
Dan seemed to hear him, though, and the hallucinations of the hands he was frantically trying to catch suddenly disappeared and instead a real hand came to rest on his shoulder.
"Are you OK?" Dan breathed, tiredly, because he'd only just woken up and it was 1AM, but his question was frankly quite a stupid question because Phil didn't look OK, and even semi-conscious Phil knew he didn't look OK.
Before he could answer, he promptly threw up in his mouth, gingerly swallowed it and drew in a long, scratchy breath.
"Co- Cou- you… uh…" he rasped, and he frantically pored over his thoughts to try and find the words he was looking for, "liquid… thing… WATER! Water… and- and- t- tahhh..?"
"Tablets?" Dan suggested, gently, assuming the only thing that really went with water and began with 'ta-', and he received a nod of verification.
He went off to fetch the water and tablets, but not before checking his friend's temperature with two fingers in-between his eyes and finding him to be oddly warm.
He supposed fevers linked closely to psychedelic, hallucinogenic, kaleidoscopic fever dreams, and he would be right.