GLOGtober Challenge: A Connection Between Disparate Worlds; Or: The Public Universal Bathroom

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of Walfalcon: https://sameissharkinjapanese.blogspot.com/

Friend of the blog Mikesmix came up with an idea both intriguing and disturbing:

This is that, but more:

The Public Universal Bathroom

Consider a trail - one person walking might bend the grass in their footprints, only for it to straighten in the next wind. Then more people walk the same path, and more people again after them. The grass is trampled, the earth hard-packed. The grass dies, and the bare earth is opened to the sky.

By repeated action the trail is transformed from a concept existing in the minds of those who walk it into a physical entity.

Now consider a public bathroom - the turtle-heading trailhead of a different sort of path - a liminal space you go to when you've got to go, you've got to go, and the more people go, go, go the more the waste-pipes stretch invisibly behind the walls, the more corners angle themselves for soiled tiles to turn around, the more unspeakable stenches waft from places yet unseen.

Follow the smells, peek behind the new corners, and you may find yourself in the Public Universal Bathroom. For a while you may not even realize you're there (was the bathroom in this subway station always this confusing?) because in its shallows it looks much the same as every other public bathroom. This is the level that those in the know in occulture prefer to stick to, and to those in the know it is an amenity of great convenience - step into a washroom at Toronto Pearson, step out of a washroom at YYC Calgary, skip the lines and the security checks and most of the travel time and discomfort.

Like the oceans' shallows, the shallows of the P.U.B. are not without their dangers - their riptides and blue holes and razor corals. For one: navigation. The P.U.B. is a non-Euclidean space - finding your way isn't a matter as simple as taking the next right after a broken stall. You might have to crawl into the space behind a third mirror, take four rights then fifty steps back, pop back in and up through the ceiling to crawl another mile through dusty ductwork, and so on, with only the marks left by past travelers to find your way. There's a thin margin of error where if you're lucky one mistake could land you a world away from where you wanted to come out and if you're unlucky dump you into the P.U.B.'s deep end. It's also constantly shifting, growing, and collapsing - what was a dependable route one month might be something else entirely the next. A number of occulture enthusiasts make their living (and lose their lives) mapping, re-mapping, and selling these routes. As the matter making it up tessellates and stretches beyond what any sane architect would recommend it can also become subtly unstable, with a fall through a too-thin floor plunging you into a pit of pooled filth or into the deep end.

The people you'll most likely encounter in the shallows are either fellow travelers, or hopelessly lost and too starved, dehydrated, and sick to pose much of a threat.

A good sign you've gone too deep is that the people you encounter have acclimated - clad in layered and hardened papier-mâché, hardened themselves in wars over myco-farms and fishing pits, scarred by sharpened pipes and shattered porcelain. Among them are the cruiser-bruisers, homosensuals who make love and war bedecked in man-leather cut from defeated enemies and fallen friends, terminally-infected oracles who puke revelations from their septic-fever dreams, jenkem addicts so bloated with methane they walk upside-down on the ceilings, mold-men who've become symbiotic with the P.U.B.'s fungus, helminth-puppets, slime-exuding wrigglers who make compacted settlements in spaces no-one else can move within, and so on and so on. Few remember the world beyond the Bathroom, and fewer still wish to return to it.

Besides the people, the animals too in the deep end have acclimated.

There are swarms of paper-chewing roaches, sometimes caught, mashed, and strained for the alcohol that ferments in their gut, no serious threat to someone conscious and in good health unless a mass of them suddenly bulges and explodes from behind drywall.

There are splotchy little toads, hard to distinguish from the nastiness that stains the floors of the P.U.B. and sometimes deadly toxic, even to creatures that have become immune to the general sepsis of the place.

There are rats that have bred to become big and quick like dogs, pack-hunting ankle-rippers, and there are dogs that have become like rats, Lilliputian descendants of service and emotional support animals which followed their owners into bathrooms and never left.

In the flooded lakes with piss-trough tributaries there are catfish-fat neotenic drainflies - scum-nibbling swimming maggots - and there are serpents, returned to prehistoric gigantism, writhing in the murky depths and snatching those incautious by the shore and door-raft gondoleers making their way across.

And these are just what are commonly known and encountered - the P.U.B. has its own cryptids, its own monstrous tales told around piles of smouldering cardboard and dried dung:
hairless possums as strong and cunning as tigers, with long tails that twist into neck-snapping nooses,
bacterial-mass tides that outgrew the guts that once held them, capable of digesting anything they sweep across,
flushed fetuses that retained atavistic gills, lurking in bowls and plumbing with sharp teeth that constantly replace themselves like a shark's,
and cyst-crowned minotaurs able to warp the malleable space of the P.U.B. into a labyrinth that leads right into their clutches,
to name a few.

Despite these dangers travelers may make their way to the deep P.U.B. not by accident but by intent - for through here one might find their way not only across the world, but across worlds. Such routes are the stuff that occultural gang-wars are fought over and which lifetimes are spent to discover. Follow such an anabatic route, fighting your way through all the terrors of the P.U.B., and you might emerge into a world where people go number one and number two through the same birdish hole, and where science and philosophy have taken entirely different tracks.

In the deep P.U.B. it's said that one can go even deeper still - that there are places in the dankest and darkest sections where masonric rift tear themselves through the floor: gates to the realm of Cloacina, to sewer-works older and grander than any made by mankind, where the shit of the gods themselves flows in rivers, more precious than gold and halfway to nectar, ambrosia, and the clay of raw creation.