A young man sat at a table. It just so happened that he was dressed as a particular alien species called a troll, surrounded by others who were similarly outfitted. Though it was sixteen years ago he was given life, it wasn't until this day that he would be given a name!

Yeah, actually, that was false. This guy had been named for quite a while. His name was J3FFR3Y TOB1N.

Uh, ahem. Jeffrey Tobin.

So anyway, this young man/troll was sitting at a table, eating his lunch. It was a little past noon on the first day of one of the biggest conventions in Arizona: SmileCon. Jeff was outfitted as the male version of Terezi, a character from a lovely little webcomic called Homestuck. Among other things, that meant he was wearing gray face paint, a pair of pointy candy-corn-esque horns, and a shirt displaying the Libra symbol underneath a red-and-teal jacket. He also wore a pair of pointed glasses, which (he'd been told) turned everything red. But that was okay, because Jeff happened to be colorblind. It was like wearing a pair of shades; everything was a little darker than usual. Also grayer.

The character he was genderbending was just plain blind (but no worries: she could see with her nose), so he carried her red-and-white cane topped with the head of a dragon. There was no need for a wig—Jeff's black hair was already suitable for his character. That was a bit of a relief. Wigs, you know, could be pretty frustrating sometimes. They were only one of the many pains a serious cosplayer had to undergo.

And Jeff was a serious cosplayer.

Okay, maybe not really serious, but still. He'd had his share of cosplay turmoil. Not to mention that he'd lost a few potential friends and more than a few rungs on the social ladder after he picked up some rather unusual habits from his fandom. Oh, well, they weren't great friends, and he didn't care about popularity anyway.

They thought he seemed cool. Then he licked them.

"Dude," said the guy sitting next to Jeff, a Homestuck who was cosplaying Dirk Strider and whose real name was…Colin? Corrin? Jeff could never remember. He was a member of the Homestuck group from Jeff's town, which met about every month to hang out, spot references, walk around town dressed in weird outfits and attract stares. Most of them went to the same school; Jeff, who was a junior in high school, attended the same tiny private academy that he'd gone to his whole life. "Dude. Check out this Homestuck Hiatus tumblr."

Colin—Corrin—screw it, Dirk—held out his smartphone. Jeff took one look at the gif of Jake English's body and face swinging back and forth along his stretched-out head and snorted out laughter into his pizza. He put the pizza down and kept on laughing, pushing the phone back toward its owner. "Jegus, that's way too awesome. And I've seen this a zillion times before. Homestuck's been on hiatus for months."

The Dirk shrugged. "Days, months, it's still painful. And hilarious."

"Sure," said Jeff, grinning his perpetual grin. It was a very characteristic, open-mouthed grin, and was in fact one of the reasons why he'd first decided to cosplay Terezi. Jeff's grin annoyed some, but most people he knew just took it for granted by now. "Have you seen the one with Feferi and Eridan's eyes?"

"What? No," said the Dirk.

Jeff grabbed the phone back and started scrolling through the blog, trying to find the picture. He talked as he scrolled: "It's great. Eridan's standing over here, and his eyes are all copy-pasted over each other and snaking all over the page, and then they end next to Feferi who's staring at him like, 'What the hell?' and he's just like 'hey fef'… Oh, hey, here it is." He handed the phone back to the Dirk. It should probably be noted here that one should not be expected to keep track of the characters in Homestuck. There are at least twenty characters that real fans are expected to know, all of whom have told the story from their point of view at some point or another. Homestuck is some serious stuff. Yeah, no, that's a lie.

Jeff pushed his chair back, the metal legs grating loudly against the tile floor, and stood up. "Hey, I've gotta use the bathroom. Be back in a minute." The Dirk might have nodded, eating a slice of pizza with one hand and scrolling through Tumblr with the other.

When Jeff stepped out of the bathroom minutes later, the first thing he noticed was the emptiness. His eyes flicked from the hall in front of him, to the crowd of nameless cosplayers, to the deserted table. There were no gray faces or horoscope symbols to be seen. They were gone.

Of course, this didn't perturb Jeff in the slightest. He was way too cool for that. Really, though, Jeff wasn't hurt that they'd abandoned him in anyway. It wasn't like he knew them really well—he only saw them maybe once a month, and kept in touch over the internet in between. Sure, they were the only ones who didn't get more than mildly weirded out when he pretended to lick them, and he had been known to spend hours at a time roleplaying with them over Facebook—but that wasn't the point. The point is, Jeff didn't mind. He set off in the direction he thought they had probably gone, thinking of all the funny things he would say when he found them.

You see, the keyword here is when. Jeff had no reason to believe that he would find his group again in the very near future. He definitely wasn't going to find himself in a strange room, which would then emit a strange sound, possibly transporting him to a strange dimension. That's really a bizarre and impossible situation. There's no way it would ever happen.

Countless presumably colorful cosplayers flowed past him. He knew none of them. As his eyes followed a group of people laughing together, walking in the opposite direction, Jeff maybe wished, for just a moment, that he had friends as close as that. Friends who wouldn't forget about him and leave him behind. Also, friends who wouldn't think that spending all your time online reading an insanely long webcomic, and then dressing up as a character from that webcomic, was all that strange. Yeah, it would be pretty great if he had some friends like that.

It was too bad that all of his school friends thought Homestuck was crazy. Fortunately, Jeff knew he possessed the rare ability to walk up to a complete stranger and turn on all his weird, which was especially useful at a convention like this.

But then the people he met would probably forget about him. Which, by the way, didn't bother him at all.

Yeah, there was no sign of his friends here. For all he knew, he could be going in the completely wrong direction. Jeff scanned the hallway and spotted a woman wearing a shirt printed with the word SmileCon standing near the wall. She was carrying a stack of papers and a clipboard, and struck him as the kind of person who might be able to help him out. He changed direction, pushing his way through the crowd toward her.

"Hey," he said when he reached her. She paused and looked at him. Her gaze, behind her glasses, was unusually sharp and piercing. Jeff pretended it didn't make him uncomfortable and went on to ask, "Did a group of Homestucks come this way a few minutes ago? Gray skin, orange horns, black shirts, plus a few humans?"

The woman regarded him for a moment. He waited. Then she said, "Yes, I believe they did." She turned to point at a smaller hall off the side of the main one. "They went that way, I think."

"Thanks," said Jeff. "Nice pin, by the way." He pointed at the pin she wore, which was the same design on Homestuck human Roxy Lalonde's shirt.

"What, this?" The woman touched her pin, giving Jeff a better view. He blinked. What he had thought was the shape of a four-eyed cat's head was actually just a simple smiley face—the symbol of the convention.

"Uh…yeah. Smiley faces are awesome." He turned away before she could respond.

Jeff stood examining the hallway for a moment. It was a pretty dark and suspicious-looking hallway. There was pretty much no way his friends had gone in there. After a moment's thought, he turned and walked away.

What? No alternate dimensions in this guy's future—it said so. Jegus, don't you read?

"Jeff!"

Jeff turned. Was it just his imagination, or had he heard somebody calling his name?

"Jeff!"

There it was again! There was no doubt about it this time; the sound was definitely coming from the hallway he'd been directed to. Jeff gave the entryway another look. Maybe it wasn't quite as dark as he'd thought…

He made up his mind. Glancing around one more time just to make sure his group really was nowhere in sight, Jeff stepped into the empty side hallway. He was right—it wasn't nearly as dark as it had looked from out in the bright, swarming main area. He'd always wondered if being colorblind sometimes threw off his brightness perception a bit.

At the end of the hall, a door stood slightly ajar, flooding the hall with light. Beyond it, he thought he could hear voices. Preparing his best crazy grin, Jeff picked up the pace, anticipating the moment when he could laugh off the whole thing with his group. He reached the door and pushed it open.

For a very brief moment, Jeff registered a huge, empty room. Certainly there were no Homestucks present. Then his vision went black, as if someone had just shut off all the lights, and he felt a powerful tugging sensation at his feet. The last thing he heard before everything was sucked away was a sound that could only be described as PCHOOOOO…