A Cocoon Of Not Quite Pure Chaos

20260516

Written for Bradley Ramsey’s “Halls Of Pandemonium”, Day 16.

Norm's story started here. And was originally going to end there too, but...

Norm was being held prisoner, he was certain of it. The one thing this mercurial madhouse refused to produce was an exit.
How long had he been trapped here? Time, usually the most stalwart of companions, seemed as confused as the rest of this restless space. Nothing was content to stay put. Anything Norm focused on he found he could keep as was - mostly. But everything around that stabilised spot redoubled its efforts to flout physical laws, and the resulting contrast made his head swim.
Terrifying though it was to have rooms warp and morph around him, so that without moving he was continually in an unknown place, he reluctantly decided that was better than the strain of trying to keep anything fixed. As it should be!!
At first he’d run headlong, desperately seeking the door he’d foolishly entered through. Then, as exhaustion dulled panic into fear, he started investigating any other escape. But windows became walls as soon as he grasped something to try smashing them with, and moments later whatever he’d been holding was an entirely different object unsuited for breaking glass.
Eventually Norm settled himself, arms wrapped around his head, and tried to think. He wished he could squish himself into a corner, have his back against something solid, but wall placement was as uncommitted as the room’s contents.
What to do?
After a few minutes of inarticulate mental flailing, Norm reasoned that if he was being held captive, which he certainly seemed to be, that meant someone was in charge of all this. Whereas if this was some sort of fever-dream pitcher plant, at least there was nothing to lose by trying to reason with it.
So he lifted his head - keeping his eyes closed - cleared his throat, and managed to croak “Excuse me? Is, um, anyone there?”
Given the endless rhythmless soup of sounds which filled the space it was impossible to say for sure that there’d been no response. Just not one he could understand.
“This has been… Um. I appreciate you having me. But, uh, I have work tomorrow. I need to be getting going.”
He risked a quick peek around. No door. Nothing recognisable as a person. No sign that he’d been understood or even perceived.
Alright. What else could he try?
Well… since nothing here seemed able to make up its mind, perhaps if he just kept trying to move in one direction, he’d eventually be able to… push out? As it moved around him. Granted, that did mean touching the morphing matter, and getting close to it did seem to solidify it rather…
A shift, noticeable in this endless sea of aimless movement like the singular purposeful stream of bubbles moving through a river. The chaos was, for a moment, deliberate.
Then she was sat on the floor next to him. Just far enough apart that neither of them could touch the other.
At first glance a mere human would’ve dismissed her as the messy, scatterbrained type, and carefully not looked closer, for fear of what perceiving true chaos would do to the psyche. For Norm, who inflicted the exact same problem from the exact opposite direction, she might as well have been a terrifying alien.
“Oh good!” She nodded. To him? To herself? To some unseen party? “You’re alive.”
That was, generally speaking, a hypothetical good sign. Norm would certainly rather be talking to an Utterly Wrong person who wanted him not to be dead. Of course, he would rather be talking to a normal person who didn’t want him to be dead, or better still be left alone in the peaceful order which he was used to.
Still, it seemed like a positive development.
“I’m glad you didn’t force your way out.” She said, her gravity-less curls bobbing in front of her face in a way Norm felt surely ought to be infuriating. “The cocoon has a hard enough time staying quasi-stable in the fringes of Pandemonium like this.”
“Quasi-stable??” Norm croaked, aghast. “Nothing here stays put!”
Plus, his understanding of cocoons, gleaned from a long-ago zoo trip, was that cocoons existed so a being could be broken down and turned into something entirely different. He was not at all keen on this idea, particularly when applied to him, and double particularly when carried out by this nightmare!
“Well, we are in Pandemonium.” She said, as if that should mean something to him. “If this hadn’t been lurking near where you came in, you’d have gone up poof. Dissolved.”
“Diss…” Norm clutched his head, which was pounding. Mostly stress, he was fairly sure. Probably nothing to do with dissolving. That was something you’d definitely notice you were doing, right??
“Oh, for - can none of you Order-Born improvise?”
Norm shook with the helpless terrified rage of someone who’d never had to learn to deal with breaks in his schedule, because they simply didn’t happen. Not to him.
And around him the space froze. Crystallised.
Cracked.
“Ok speaking of improvising we need to go right now!” She leapt up, grabbed Norm’s ears, and pulled him yelping to his feet.
“Here, focus on this, ok??”
Norm blinked pained tears from his eyes and found himself staring at…
It was, he felt strangely certain, meant to be a door. But it wasn’t certain about this. Seemingly stuck on the infinite number of things it could be, so long as it didn’t make up its mind.
Being past done with all this, Norm seized what should be a handle and fumed at it. As he did so, she leant close and knocked.
The space shifted, into the door it should be. Norm’s jaw unclenched, his brows knitting together, and the space settled itself.
“Awesome through we go!!”
Before Norm had a chance to grasp what was happening, much less wonder what was waiting on the other side of this door, he was being shoved through. And, with the space screaming itself apart behind them, he had no choice but to improvise.

Prompt was “Write about a home in the realm of Pandemonium that changes its shape and rooms based on whoever enters it.”