His first two thoughts on the back of the red van were wordless, pure emotional bursts that he couldn't have described eloquently with a million years to think about it. Anyone trying to simplify those feelings must first acknowledge that no set of words can ever be exactly equivalent to those sorts of unfiltered emotions, and approach the task with that in mind.
The first one was roughly, "Heh heh, pretty clever of me, huh?"
The second one was roughly, "OUCH!"
The universe tore up around him, he hung on for dear life, and his knuckles went white with exertion at about the same time his vision went white from overstimulation. It had been a few seconds- or a few hours, or a few millennia- when he realized how tight his grip was, how much his fingers ached, and how much longer he could hold on- only a few seconds. Hoping desperately that the stillness around him was real stillness and not the product of his fragile polygonal brain shutting down in the face of incomprehensible speeds, he let go and tumbled down onto what felt almost like asphalt, but more alive. He opened his eye. There was another eye staring back at him from the ground.
"Agh-!"
He stood up involuntarily on shaky legs, wringing his hands, adjusting to the feeling of being on solid ground once again. It was solid ground! And the sky wasn't TV static! It was... reddish-pink in some parts and orange, like the color of fire, in others. Another universe, surely, and one where the ground had a heartbeat. Or had that been his own heartbeat playing loudly in his head? He reached down and felt the warm blacktop beneath him. No, it really was pulsating. Was this place alive? That explained the eye. That also explained the small mouth he now noticed a couple of feet from him, and the pair of noses growing from the ground several feet beyond that. This place had a lot of orifices, and though he knew it wasn't too different from the faces that adorned many of Elmore's objects, he still found himself averting his gaze.
He turned his attention away from the ground and the sky to check out what was in between them and found a sight both familiar and unsettling: a gas station! Its name: Gas Giant. Its logo: A star with a big red X through it. The exterior was almost fleshy. Everything here was either almost fleshy or entirely fleshy. No way could he stay here, but that was alright, all he had to do was hang on again when the shopkeeper left. All he had to do was go through that vertigo-inducing nightmare of an experience a third time. "Toughen up, stupid, you're almost to safety," said the little demon version of himself on his right shoulder. "Maybe you should run for the hills and stay in this dimension," said the other little demon on his left shoulder, who really should have been an angel, right? Why were both of them demons? Because he was evil? What did that say about his mental state? Oh, well, it was just a creative visualization of his subconscious, and that meant he could reach up with both hands and crush them into dust. He took great pleasure in doing so a few seconds later.
A grotesque, four-armed monster with an eye where its mouth should have been left the convenience store portion of the station with a shopping bag in his telekinetic grasp. It was followed by a more humanoid armless being who glowed white and had an electrical socket-shaped face. In other words, nothing too out of the ordinary. It was much more concerning for Rob to see the shopkeeper, who stood taller than he imagined and wore a black hood that made him look like a cultist, leaving the store with a party-sized bag of chips and a gaze that could fall on him any moment! He ducked behind the van, mind racing. This was bad. He couldn't be found out, not now! Not so close to salvation, to starting over. What had his plan been? How had this ever seemed foolproof? He scouted out a path away from the van and realized to his horror that there was a sheer drop on the horizon. This was a floating island. It was far too large to see what exactly was beneath, but he also had no time to run to the edge and find out. There was nowhere to hide.
Rob steeled himself and decided not to try.
He stood next to the van, looked down at an invisible watch, leaned one elbow on the hood of the van all cool-like, and glanced up for just a second to meet the left eye of the shopkeeper as he returned from his snack run- meeting both eyes had always been a challenge for him, of course.
"Hey there, man," said Rob, voice faltering ever so slightly. For a long while, it seemed like he wasn't going to get a reaction.
Before he received any kind of verbal response, his arm was grabbed, the door was opened, and he was painfully yanked into the shadowy store within once again. The shopkeeper's shoulders slumped and he let out a loud, vulnerable sigh as his silhouette faded into the darkness.
"How did you follow me? Did you steal something back there when you tried to attack me? A portal replicator, perhaps, or one of those keychains that links your soul to the first person you inflict pain upon?"
"No! No. I just held onto the back."
"You-"
The shopkeeper slapped his knee, or at least that's what it sounded like. He laughed! Hard. And then he glared disapprovingly.
"You've got to be messing with me," he said, sounding defeated. "It was really that simple? I'll have to remember to install barbed wire on the back door."
"You were about to leave me in that crumbling static wasteland. You would have done the same if it had been you out there!"
"Why would I have hung onto the back of my own van?"
"I don't- I mean- It's a hypothetical, okay?"
The shopkeeper ate some chips sorrowfully. There was a loud crunching noise, and Rob pondered his lack of a visible mouth, but decided it would be rude to ask his potential ticket out of here about the details of his strange shadow man anatomy. Finally, the crunching slowed, the van- which had been slowly moving- came to a halt, and the shopkeeper opened the doors again.
"No, no, no, wait! Please! Don't leave me here-"
"Go fill up the tank."
Rob gulped, wondering whether this was the mercy it appeared to be.
"Is this- is this goodbye? After I'm done, are you just gonna-"
"Come back after you've filled the van up and we can talk."
He nodded wordlessly and made his way to the pump. The hose also felt alive, but he pretended it was just the diesel coursing through and the idea calmed his nerves a little. As the tank filled up, his emotional state changed, but he found that he couldn't tell whether he was getting more anxious or less, much to his discontent. The machine beeped, the flow stopped (though the pulsating of the hose didn't), and a gaping maw opened up in the fueling station where a card reader might have been. A shadowy hand tapped him on the shoulder and passed him a small velvet sachet that he quickly emptied into the hole, flinching and stepping back when he realized the bag was full of teeth.
"Will the place we're going be as freaky as this place? For that matter, what is this place?" Rob asked, head in his hands, sitting on the floor of the van a few moments later.
"A dimension with no rules and cheap fuels," said the shopkeeper in response. He shrugged. "And, no. Where we're going-"
"Where we're going? So that means I'm coming with you, then! Why didn't you say so earlier?"
"Don't test my patience, young man. I'm taking you along on a one-way trip, free of charge, out of the kindness of my heart."
"And where was the kindness of your heart back when-"
"I said not to test my patience!"
"Fine, fine. Tell me about where we're headed."
The van pulled out. It was far easier to stomach the feeling when you were inside of it rather than hanging onto the back for dear life, Rob found. How different would his new home- he had taken to thinking of it as a home already- be from his original home? Would there be buses there to ride? Coffee to drink? It seemed like the shopkeeper wasn't about to answer for several long moments, but he piped up with perhaps the least helpful piece of information possible.
"It's a place where you never have to pump your own gas."
"So, are we talking some sort of sci-fi future dimension, or...?"
"No, no, they've just got attendants! It's not the future."
"Does this place we're going have a name? Would I have even heard of it?"
"Oregon."
"Huh? But- I thought you said we were going to another dimension."
"We are."
The all-too-familiar feeling of the universe tearing up erupted around them for just a moment and then, though it wasn't visible from the store, a road stretched out before the driver, and the first vestiges of daylight spilled up over the silhouette of a dark forest into a starry night sky.
