Ch 02: Welcome to the Backrooms. You will die here.

Noah remembered a quote that he had read about the Backrooms.

"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in."

That, was bad enough. But it was the last part of the quote that terrified him.

"God save you if you hear anything wandering around nearby. Because it sure as hell has heard you."

Noah tried to stay calm, and to step back in exactly the spot he came from. If he was lucky, he would return to the underground parking, and then would run as far as he could. He'd rather abandon his car than risk entering the Backrooms again.

But despite many, many attempts, he failed to return to reality.

He wanted to vomit. Why did this have to happen to him?

After a few minutes, Noah managed to repress his terror. Fear wouldn't help him survive this. After forcefully regulating his breathing, he removed his shoes. Walking in socks would make a lot less noise than doing it with his shoes on. He kept them in his right hand, as he didn't want to leave any sign of his presence behind. And he started walking in a random direction, staying close to the walls and straining his hearing, looking carefully around each corner before advancing.

He knew there were exits in the Backrooms. He just had to find one, before something found him. Some of those exits would only lead him to other floors of the Backrooms that were just as dangerous, but it was a choice between trying his luck, or dying here.

He feared the moment where his stomach would start to growl from hunger, or where he would be too exhausted to continue and would collapse from exhaustion. Sometimes, he snored a little. And in this place, it would be deadly.

At times, Noah put his index in his mouth and licked it, before raising it in the air, trying to feel for an air flow. But he found nothing.

Noah didn't know how long he wandered in the endless Backrooms. Even with his slow and stealthy walk, he was pretty sure he must have moved at least twenty kilometers. He didn't particularly stick to a single direction, as he knew his odds of finding an exit in this endless place were the same anywhere. He might even walk through one without realizing, just like how he entered.

But eventually, he started hearing something else beside the maddening buzz of the fluorescent lights. It sounded like… the sound of waves on a beach, and wind. With hope surging in his heart, Noah wetted his finger, and he though he felt a slight air flow, coming from the direction he thought the sounds came from. He couldn't be completely sure, as sounds reverberated strangely in this insane place.

Still carefully checking his surroundings, Noah progressed in that direction, and the sounds became clearer, louder. Looking behind a corner, he found a long hallway where the floor was slowly curving into a descending slope. The slope became more pronounced as it went, hiding the end of the hallway behind its curvature, but Noah was certain the sounds were coming from there.

As he was about to carefully advance in the hallway, Noah looked around yet another time, and froze as he saw… it.

It looked vaguely like someone had taken a bunch of scaffolding steel tubes, painted them black, and tried to make a three meters tall skeleton out of them, in a vaguely humanoid shape, but without a head. And those tubes had blurry shapes, as if they were constantly vibrating like tuning forks, but without emitting any sound.

The thing made a strange liquid noise, half growl, half giggle, and started running toward him. Noah didn't wait and was already sprinting down the hallway, hoping like hell that whatever was behind the curvature really was an exit. An exit large enough for him to pass through.

The thing was gaining on him, growling, forcing him to keep up with his reckless speed despite the slope becoming dangerously steep. He saw the exit, and a somewhat distant view of water. Noah felt both relief and worry, as he fell and started sliding feet first down the slope.

Relief, as the exit was big enough that he should have no problem passing through.

Worry, as the exit clearly wasn't at ground level. He couldn't really estimate the height from the narrow view he had as he glided toward it, and fervently hoped the fall would be survivable.

Noah heard the creature's growl again, but it didn't come from right behind him anymore. Whatever that thing was had stopped pursuing him.

As he passed through, the outside suddenly filled his vision, but his full attention was on the water below. Noah gritted his teeth as his falling speed accelerated. He was maybe twenty meters above the surface, but with the velocity he had already gained from his slide, he was still worried he might get injured if he entered the water in a bad posture. Thankfully, the water looked deep enough. He took a deep breath, pointed his feet, and put his arms in a protective posture to shield his face, somewhat similar to that of a boxer.

The water felt like a huge slap all over his body. Noah immediately spread his legs and arms to kill his downward momentum and swam back to the surface. He was slightly out of breath from the sudden sprint and adrenaline spike and gulped air as he looked around him.

By a stroke of good luck, Noah wasn't lost in the middle of the ocean. That would have been a Bad Thing. He was in fact quite close to a large beach, maybe a hundred meters from him. And a dozen women were either on that beach or playing in the water. Another stroke of good luck, as he wouldn't have to try his hand at surviving alone in the wilderness. They obviously had noticed him, as they had stopped playing in the water and were facing his direction. But there were two other things that caught his attention. The first was a truly massive black castle, of a style he couldn’t identify, not far beyond the trees. The second thing was that the trees themselves, as well as the bushes and grass he could see were all various shades of… purple?

Wherever he now was, Noah had a suspicion he wasn't on Earth. It was a preposterous assumption, but spending the better part of a day inside the Backrooms had made him very open-minded about supernatural things.

And if he wasn't on Earth, there was no telling what kind of predators might lurk in the waters. Noah started swimming towards the beach. Not directly towards the women, as he didn't want to scare them, but slightly to the side. The dark gray business suit he was wearing was interfering with his movements, but he didn't want to abandon any of his clothes or his wallet. He might need them sorely later, and losing his shoes would already be an issue.

The women gathered on the beach and talked among themselves quietly as they watched him swim closer. Those who had been in the water were putting on some clothes.

Noah finally got close enough to reach the ground under the water, and slowly walked to dry land, about twenty meters from the group. As he loosened his tie and removed his vest to try to wring some seawater out of it, he took a close look at the women. The first thing that struck him was that they were all young, and incredibly beautiful, each in her own way. And while some wouldn't look out of place in some countries on Earth, others would raise eyebrows, to say the least. Like the tallest one whose facial features reminded him of a Chinese or Vietnamese woman, but had a skin tone darker than most people from central Africa. They were now all dressed in a red and white uniform that reminded him of a maid outfit, but one thing they had in common was that they all had a thin black metal band around their necks.

"Gho sin si ghalla?" One of them called out.

Noah sighed. Of course, language was going to be a huge problem. He smiled, trying to appear as harmless as possible, and nodded at them.

"Hello? I'm sorry, but I do not speak your language."

The women understood the issue, and quickly spoke among themselves for a moment, before one of them took a red gem from a pocket and crushed it between her fingers. The gem's fragments were lit up in a red light and evaporated in the air.

Noah raised an eyebrow as he watched this phenomenon, and froze in alarm as the air shimmered in front of the women. An incredibly gorgeous woman stepped through the air distortion. She was tall, had red eyes and long silver hairs, a body that simply couldn’t be more perfect or alluring, and wore an elaborate red dress with black highlights.

He somehow knew right here and then that this being wasn't human. That this human shape in front of him was just the small, visible part of an entity that he couldn't comprehend. Like trying to understand the shape of an object existing in more than three dimensions. He felt an urge to kneel or prostrate.

The being looked at Noah for an instant, then turned toward the women who had summoned her and smiled. They quickly spoke to her as they bowed. One of them pointed toward the sea, above the water, and mimicked something falling with her hands. The silver-header woman nodded, said a few words to them with another smile that they quickly returned, and walked toward Noah.

"Greetings, Visitor. What are you doing here?" She said, in perfect English.

Noah bowed respectfully. It kept his eyes away from her gorgeous face, as he feared that if he stared at her directly, he would become mesmerized.

"Hello. I'm glad to see language isn't going to be a such a hurdle after all. My name is Noah Enfield. I am deeply sorry for intruding on your lands, but I didn't have much of a choice."

"Oh? Then let me read your memories."

"What? My memories are private. I'll answer any question you may have, so please stay out of my head. That's a violation of privacy." Noah protested.

The silver-haired woman looked at him in amusement.

"Too late, already done. Ah, but where are my manners. I am Lilith, Goddess of Conquest, Lust and Domination. You are in my domain, and those are some of my servants."

"Again, I am very sorry for intruding. If you could just show me how to return to my world…"

"I know. You got caught in a spatial anomaly, as they happen from time to time. You found yourself stranded in the Sea of Quanta, the primordial chaotic space between dimensions. A place that takes the form of the first thing those trapped inside imagine when they think about an abnormal space. If you had never heard about what you call the Backrooms before, that place would have taken a completely different shape. Good job surviving, by the way. Most people in this situation would have panicked and been killed fast."

"Thank you… my Lady? I'm sorry, I don't know the proper way to address a Goddess."

Lilith smiled slightly, and suddenly, Noah's hairs and clothes were dry. He looked down in surprise, and the shoes he had abandoned in the Backrooms when he ran were back on is feet.

"As long as you aren’t deliberately disrespectful, it’s fine. We Gods care little about etiquette. But to anticipate your next question, yes, I could send you back to your world after fixing the spatial anomaly and erasing your memories of the incident, but your presence here might be considered to be fate. I was about to search for a handful of mortals soon, and from what I have seen from your memories, you have a suitable personality for what I have in mind. You are cautious, but not cowardly. Kind, but also ruthless and decisive."

"Tell me, Noah Enfield. Would you like to obtain great power, immortality, and a harem of beauties? Would it not be much better than returning to your short, mundane life?"

Noah looked at the deity with an expression that was decidedly a tad less respectful. What Lilith the Goddess of Scams?

"…I would say 'where do I sign?', except that there's no such thing as a free lunch. There's always a catch."

She snorted.

"Of course, there is. And you just passed the first test. If you had naively accepted without wanting to hear about the details first, I would have rescinded my offer and sent you back to your world. But before we get into the details of what I want from you, some context is needed. Let us discuss this in a more appropriate setting."

The Goddess snapped her fingers, and Noah found himself seating at the end of a long table, made of a smooth black wood he didn’t recognize. They were now in a large dining room, tastefully decorated.

On the side, the women that were in the beach earlier exchanged a few more words with Lilith, before they left the room. More beautiful young women, dressed in the same uniforms and with more black collars around their necks, entered with a tea set, and started serving first Lilith, then Noah.

"Thank you." He said with a small smile and a nod. The woman acting as a maid obviously understood the meaning of his words, and smiled back before she walked away. He made certain not to look at any woman for more than an instant, as he didn't want the Goddess to start thinking he might have designs on any of them. That would be terminally stupid.

Noah waited until she started drinking before he did the same. This tea, if that was the name of that beverage, was different from anything he ever tasted before, but it was insanely delicious.

"Now, I will tell you how you might be of use to me." Started Lilith.