“Hello?” the voice repeated. “Are you still there?”

  I whispered a bad word under my breath. No getting around it. The voice was coming from the other side of the dark descent that led out of the little cave I had awoken in.

  “Yes!” I called back. “Yeah, I’ll… I’ll be right there, okay? Just stay where you are!”

  “Okay…”

  I approached the shadowed crevice again, and swore slightly louder.

  “Everything okay up there?”

  “Uhm… Yep, yep, everything’s fine,” I lied.

  The tunnel didn’t seem to share the crystals that shrouded my cavern in light. Instead, it was crooked, dark, uneven, and steep. Trying to descend it seemed like a great way to break an ankle at best or get myself killed (again) at worst, but I couldn’t just leave whoever was down there alone. If nothing else, they might have some idea of what was happening to me!

  “Give me a minute,” I called down the tunnel, turning back to the cave and assessing my options.

  As I feared, a rope and flashlight hadn’t spontaneously appeared to solve the problem for me, so that wasn't great. The cave was still empty, just some dirt, loose gravel, a few good-sized chunks of rocks and…

  And the crystals.

  I looked at the walls closest to the crevice.

  “Here goes nothing,” I told myself, approaching one of the clusters. A few of them, each about as long as my spread fingers, jutted out from a central blob of what looked like softly glowing, impossibly clear quartz. I grabbed one and pulled hard, putting all the strength of my improved body into it, but despite my best efforts, it still didn’t move.

  After a minute, I gave up, panting a little from the exertion, and tried another, to similar results. Starting to lose faith in this idea, I went to the third, and the fourth, out of sheer stubbornness–but then the fifth actually shifted a little in place.

  “Yes!” I hissed with satisfaction. I started furiously wiggling the crystal in place, feeling it move a little bit more freely with each motion, a small grinding noise indicating that I was making progress–and then, finally, it popped free of the main cluster.

  That left me holding an asymmetrical crystal. It was perhaps six inches long, and fairly thin, each of its half dozen faces less than an inch. One end was a ragged stump, where it had broken off from the main cluster, but the other was pointed. And, as I had hoped, the crystal still glowed from inside. I wasn’t sure how exactly that worked, but compared to getting hit by a bus and waking up in a random cave with the kind of body I had only dreamed about, some crystals glowing like someone had encased an LED inside of them barely registered as weird.

  I returned to the crevice leading down and out of my little cave, holding the crystal out before me like a weird, diffuse flashlight. It wasn’t perfect, but it illuminated the tunnel enough to make going down it less “potentially lethal” and more “incredibly stupid.”

  That still wasn’t ideal, but it seemed like the best I was going to get.

  “I’m coming down now,” I called down.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” the voice from earlier called back.

  “Not at all, no. But would you rather stay down there by yourself?”

  There was a moment’s pause before the voice responded, “Well, when you put it like that…”

  I found myself grinning despite the absurdity of the situation, and I started down the tunnel. I kept my weight low, my legs bent, with one arm out to the side for balance and the other held out in front of me, using the crystal to illuminate my path.

  Fortunately, the tunnel wasn’t quite as steep as I had feared. It was a surprisingly gradual slope, with enough almost-even surfaces to give me plenty of places to stop and rest. My weird shoes also held up better than expected, the ribbon-like material allowing me to shift my weight easily while the hard soles on the bottom of them gave me some desperately needed traction.

  While I carefully navigated downwards, whoever was down below continued to talk to me. “Do you know where we are? I just woke up, and I was down here.”

  As I got closer, I could make out more particulars of the voice. It was feminine, like mine, but a little more husky, with an odd lilt, like an accent I couldn’t quite place. “Same here,” I told her, my own voice tight as I let my weight slide down a little slope of gravel before I landed on a solid stone. “I was hoping you might know what was going on.”

  “Nope.” The voice was slowly getting louder, at least. Ahead, the shadows got more confusing, the tunnel seeming to end abruptly, until I got my light around one particular outcropping and saw that it merely turned to the left.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  As I turned that corner, I noticed that I could make out the tunnel a little more clearly, even outside of the bounds of my light. “I think I’m getting close,” I told the voice. “Are there any of these weird light crystals, wherever you are?”

  “Yeah,” she replied. “Just one big one, though. I didn’t know there were more like it.”

  I walked faster, my steps getting more sure as the tunnel gradually brightened, until, finally, I turned a corner and found myself in another cavern. It was just like the one I had woken up in–vaguely circular, with a flat gravel floor and an uneven domed ceiling–but where my cave had been dimly illuminated from all corners by a bunch of different crystals, this one was indeed lit from above by a single, massive crystal. It wasn’t lumpy or uneven, either. It was like a six-sided obelisk jutting from the ceiling, half-hidden in the rock above and shedding a warm, yellow glow.

  Standing directly underneath it was the apparent source of the voice I had been following. I froze when I saw her, and she did the same.

  It was her. The girl I saw back on campus, as I had gotten off the bus. The sight of her paralyzed me now just as much as it had then. It took everything I had to turn back and look at the mouth of the tunnel I had emerged from.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “Making sure there isn’t another bus, this time,” I told her.

  She sighed a little laugh, and I turned back to her.

  She was just how I remembered her, but also different. When I first saw her, her hair had been like a nebulous cloud of amber straw, tied back with a desperately straining scrunchy. Now, it was still blonde, still long, still curly, but it had a fine gloss it had been missing before, and hung slightly more flat, falling halfway down her back. It was the most noticeable indicator that, just like my body, she had been somehow improved, her imperfections and flaws smoothed away to leave behind the purest picture of her. Her skin was smoother, her pale blue-eyes brighter, and her body, while still as slender as it had been, had a sort of leanness to it that made me think of a gymnast’s.

  Also like me, her clothing had been changed, the simple white blouse and khaki slacks that had both looked like they had come right off the shelf of a department store replaced with a flowing white dress that fell past her knees. Like my new clothes, it fit oddly, loose in some places and snug in others, not governed by normal fashion trends. I didn’t need to touch it to tell that it was the same material as mine too, somewhere between leather and a synthetic cloth, but as light and flowing as cotton.

  As I looked her over, she was doing the same, our eyes finally meeting as we both concluded our mutual inspections.

  “Is it just me,” she asked, “or are you even hotter than before?”

  My heart suddenly raced, the words drawing an uncharacteristically shy smile from me. She didn’t look like the type to be so forward, but I found I kind of liked it. “Like you’re one to talk.”

  Her eyes danced and she looked down at herself, turning her arms and legs as if looking herself over for the first time. “Hmm… I think you might be right.”

  “Of course I am,” I replied instantly. She looked back to me–and the sparkle fell from her eyes as suddenly as the smirk vanished from my face. The joking and flirting was easy, and relaxing, but it didn’t change the strangeness of the situation we were in.

  “Did the bus hit you, too?” I asked.

  She responded with a shallow nod. “I saw someone dart in front of it just as it started moving, and the driver jerked on the wheel, and…”

  “And then we both woke up in this weird cave,” I finished for her. She gave me a small, thankful look. Neither of us needed to dwell on exactly what had happened before we appeared here. “I’m Dani, by the way.”

  “Oh! Right!” The other girl blushed prettily. “I’m Fallon. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay, I normally exchange names before going spelunking too.”

  She breathed another little laugh, which, to be fair, was probably more than that joke deserved. “Any idea where we are?”

  I shrugged. “I’m pretty sure it’s not Hell, but it doesn’t seem very Heavenly either, and that’s about as far as I got. How about you?”

  Fallon frowned down at herself. “I’ve got a couple. But they’re both…not great.”

  “Fal, I’m standing in an underground cave illuminated by apparently magic crystals talking to a girl I met five seconds before we were both hit by a bus. Lay it on me.”

  The girl rolled her eyes, but my words drew a little smile out of her. “It could be a coma dream.”

  I blinked mildly at her. “So… what? We’re not dead, we’re just in comas, and we’re having… a shared dream? Is that a thing?”

  She shook her head, her nebula of blonde hair moving with the motion. “I don’t think so. But it could be just a dream I’m having, and I imagined the last girl I saw before… you know.”

  I crossed my arms. “Are you saying you think I’m not real?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “I could just as easily say you’re not real, you know. I think, therefore I am, all that.”

  “But how do I know you think?” she asked.

  “And how do I know you think?” I parroted back at her, before holding up a hand. “How about we agree that circular logic and accusations of being imaginary won’t get either of us anywhere and move on to your other idea?”

  The girl paused, looking at me carefully rather than continuing.

  I sighed. “Yes, I know that’s what a dream person would say. No, that doesn’t make me a dream. Move on.”

  Fallon stuck out her tongue at me, which was entirely unfair. “My next idea is even worse.”

  “Well our situation isn’t getting any better, so let’s hear it.”

  “Have you ever heard of an isekai story?”

  Me, in the middle of writing this chapter: Oh I'm gonna end up really meta with this one, aren't I?