She started, blinking rapidly as her surroundings materialized before her, her sudden bout of vertigo subsiding as quickly as it came.

Did I—did I fall asleep?

Celine frowned—she had a lingering suspicion that she'd just experienced a strange dream, but she couldn't remember what exactly—just the unsettling feeling of feeling off-kilter, like she'd been knocking off her feet.

She sighed, hands gripping the handles of her chair, the solidness against her palms uncharacteristically strange—

Oh no—

Celine straightened up rapidly, raising her arm to check her wristwatch with bated breath as a terrible thought threw itself into her mind. If she'd fallen asleep before her presentation and missed it—

12:01pm

Celine blinked.

Huh?

She stared at the number on the watch face, her worry swiftly giving away to pure confusion.

How can it be 12:01pm? She'd gotten back to her office around 1:30pm, and there was no way she'd taken a 23-hour nap by accident unless her circadian rhythm decided today was the day it wanted to randomly go berserk and defy regular human sleep behavior.

And then Celine frowned, apprehension dawning slowly as she tilted her head further down to look at her other arm, which was still lying on the chair handle below comfortably.

The chair in her office didn't have handles.

Celine knew that was a fact, because not only had she sat in her office chair for eight hours a day for practically the entire past half-month, but its lack of handles had been an internal grievance of hers that had pained her during her first two weeks here every single time she'd forgotten and accidentally rested her elbows in mid-air.

"Okay," Celine whispered to herself under her breath, eyeing the foreign handles with wide eyes and lifting her arms off fully, heart suddenly beating with trepidation. "So I'm not in my chair."

Suddenly, she found that she didn't really want to look at anything else, fearing what she'd discover. Nevertheless, she slowly tilted her head upwards, and her gaze rested on the desk in front of her.

It was definitely her desk—except it was fully empty, its surface devoid of any papers, calculators, laptops, or flowers. To the sides, the mahogany bookshelves she was so accustomed to overflowing with old, decrepit books were barely half-full, the tomes noticeably less yellowed from age. Fierce rays of sunlight shone into the room through the two tall windows in the back, illuminating the floor by the door and the lack of Celine's work bag that was always there, except—where was it now?

She was in her office, but—none of it was right.

Celine stood up, feeling as though her brain was short-circuiting as she automatically moved towards the door. She flung it open.

She just needed to check—

It was empty.

The sign in front of the door was empty, a bare slot with no Celine Myers—Financial Analyst Intern in sight.

As if she didn't exist.

"Okay," Celine repeated to herself again, her heartbeat rising exponentially. Her movements were jerky as she re-entered the office and pressed her back against the wall. "Okay okay okay okay okay."

What was the first thing people say to do in unfamiliar situations? Observe your surroundings.

Well, Celine was going to do that then. Now that she was standing by the doorway with a clear view of the entirety of her—the—office, she was able to survey the foreign-yet-familiar environment before her with wide eyes.

It clearly looked fully unoccupied. Not only were none of her personal belongings anywhere in the office, but no one else's were either—the entire room was practically empty.

"Observe my surroundings," Celine repeated to herself, steeling her breath as she continued past the doorway and into the hallway beyond cautiously.

Despite the alien quality inside her office, the hallway outside looked the exact same as the one she'd always known. As Celine crept by each adjacent room on high alert, fearing she would run across someone or something unexpected, she only came across what she'd already known—empty offices, dark rooms, no people. Everything looked the same.

Celine exhaled shakily, pressing the elevator button at the end of the hallway and bringing her hand up to her temple. This had to just be a prank then—a punishment for missing her presentation. She knew some higher-ups in the department were pranksters (as bizarre as that sounded, but she knew Hank Pym liked hiring good-natured people), so this must've just been a last gift for her before she got fired—someone crept in while she was sleeping, changed the time on her watch, took her things, and left.

Yeah, that had to be it.

The elevator doors opened and Celine stepped through, thoughts of self-beratement now running laps around her head and causing a tornado of anxiousness to build up in her chest.

How the hell did she fall asleep right before the most important presentation of her short-lived career? Short-lived because she'd now gotten herself fired, and the implication was finally starting to hit her, and she wanted to throw herself out the window.

"Oh my god," she whispered to herself. "It's over."

Sure, Celine had a habit of sometimes overworking herself to burn-out, but—a nap! She scoffed to herself, pacing around the small space desperately. That was despicable—she never slept on the job!

She coughed and stilled, smoothing down the front of her blazer as the elevator doors opened at floor 7 to let a man carrying a newspaper and briefcase inside. All she had to do was get off on the first floor, go to her manager's office, apologize sincerely for her terrible, ill-timed mistake of a nap, and grovel until she hopefully got her job back.

Celine cringed before forcing a neutral expression back on her face. In desperate times like these, there was no space for pride—if she lost this job, she'd have to go back on welfare.

Absolutely not. She'd worked too much and too hard for that.

So, Celine took a deep breath, rolling her shoulders back and confidently raising her head—

—and she stared at the newspaper of the man with the briefcase, who had it blatantly held up so that its front-page headlines were directly in her line of sight:

CONFLICT IN THE BALKANS: THE POLITICS; Senate Vote to End Embargo May Prove a Pyrrhic Victory

Huh. Celine didn't know anything about that, and she always tried to keep up with current events. She made a mental note to read up on it later.

There was a small ding!, indicating the end of the elevator ride, and Celine tore her gaze away from the man's newspaper as the doors slid open to reveal the first floor of Pym Technologies.

Immediately, she knew something was off.

The people milling around in the lobby were all in business casual clothing, but something was just off. Their accents, the way they talked—it was all different. Celine caught snippets of conversation as she stepped off the elevator and wove through the crowd, head turning left and right and brow furthering further and further as fragments like "That latest episode of Friends was hilarious!" and "She's got moxie, that one!" floated through the air.

What the hell is moxie? Celine thought in confusion, before stopping dead at her feet and blatantly staring at the set-up of the front desk.

The usual receptionist lady who always smiled at Celine kindly wasn't there. Instead, a rigid-looking man in a pinstripe suit was fielding phone calls, his thick mustache drooping horrendously and brushing against his severe-looking chin. The layout of the leather chairs in front of the desk was completely different, now forming a sort of oval shape around a central coffee table, and—since when had that plant been there?

Even the sounds of the city, which were escaping from the streets and entering the building through the large, revolving metal doors at the entrance, sounded different from where she was standing—the horns, the clamor, the traffic—and before Celine even stepped outside, she knew something was very, very wrong.

She rushed past a woman in a conservative blazer into one of the revolving doors, adrenaline coursing through her veins and nothing but apprehension paralyzing her mind as she stumbled onto the crosswalk, feeling as though she was having an out-of-body experience as she whipped her head around in a panic, taking the current scene in.

It was wrong, all wrong—everywhere she looked, there was something wrong. San Francisco didn't look like this. Her favorite bagel place next to headquarters wasn't in its usual spot. The stores along the sidewalk and across the street were all different. The Zara she always passed by wasn't there anymore, nor the pet store with the hamsters on display for onlookers—instead, there was Rico's Apparel, and Joe & Jane's Diner, and Family DVD, and Celine didn't recognize any of it.

At some point, Celine realized she'd unconsciously started making her way along the crosswalk down the block. She gaped at the people walking next to her, not caring for her blatant gawking for once.

No one was staring down at their phones—in fact, Celine thought she didn't see any phones in sight. Women walked by in low-waisted pants, garish tank tops, crimped hair, and dark eyeshadow, while men breezed past in plaid flannels and horrifically-gelled hair. Those who exited office buildings were dressed professionally in well-pressed suits and blazers—Celine was in her work clothes too, but it just felt different.

Everything was just different.

She paused in front of an inconspicuous flower shop, feeling a tremendous headache start to bloom behind her temples.

It's like—it's like—like I'm in a different era! Am I still dreaming? I have to still be dreaming.

Celine pinched herself and grimaced at the resulting sharp stab of pain.

Okay, not dreaming.

She exhaled unevenly, leaned against the wall of the flower shop, and raised her eye-line, staring resolutely past San Francisco Bay in the distance, trying to catch her breath and rearrange some sort of logical thought in her head. Even the skyline past the bay seems less cluttered and crowded, as if buildings had just plucked away while she'd been at work.

Then her line of sight shifted automatically, and Celine found herself staring at a humongous billboard rising above the city, the bundle of large text and their corresponding visuals on the ad so ostentatiously-large that it was a wonder she hadn't seen it earlier:

STARK INDUSTRIES

G.E.N.I.U.S. - Global Environment Network Integrated User System

Experience the Future Today! Revolutionizing Your Home, One Smart Device at a Time.

Join us for the exclusive press release on August 3, 1995.