“What the fuck…” John muttered to himself in shock as he sank to sit on the basement stairs. The passenger head light assembly and a nice chunk of the engine block, along with a part of his workbench, were completely severed from their respective wholes, lying on the ground in a pool of oil and other fluids. The reason was clear, as they had been bisected by the shimmering black oval that that now occupied several meters of his parking space, the cut so smooth the metal and wood both shone with a glossy finish.

“Well, that explains the sound I heard in the shower, just a random portal slicing through my stuff…. Heh heh.” John trailed off into only mildly hysterical chuckles.

After calming down a little, and realizing that staring blankly at the phenomenon wasn’t having any real effect, John cautiously explored the portal. Holding his hand a few inches from its surface he felt… nothing. He grabbed a broom and walked to the edges and peered at it from the backside. It was a perfect plane that cut through space, as far as John could tell. Edge on it completely disappeared from view, and the back, while still black, was more matte and seemed to lack the minute undulations that rippled across the front side.

John poked it with the stick. It bounced off with a dull thudding, like he was prodding a carpeted floor. Walking back to the front, he swung his instrument at the edge, only to lose his balance lightly as the weight in his hand suddenly lightened. The neatly severed broom handle fell to the floor with a clatter, and John ran his finger across the smooth edge of the cut with a shaky whistle.

“Note to self, do not lean on side of portal.”

Getting another, longer dowel from his wood box, John made sure to hold it only loosely, and took a deep breath as he gently slid the piece into the portal, ready to let go at a moments notice. The wood slid into the gently undulating abyss like… a stick sinking into a gently undulating abyss. He gently moved his probe around, feeling a hard contact when he angled it to just below the floor level from his own perspective. Then, he gently tried to pull it back, and with no fuss it rematerialized from the inky depths.

The wood was a little cool to touch, and the end he’d tapped on the other side had a smudge of dust on it.

“Hope I didn’t just bring back Super-Aids on a stick.”

Having exhausted the scientific uses of long pieces of wood, John took out his phone and, 45 seconds and one strip of duct tape later, inserted his high tech recording probe into the dark veil. Acting out his long sublimated fantasy of being a boom mike operator, John brought his phone back over after a minute or so, turned the record function and flashlight off, then settled back on the steps as he pressed play.

The view was shaky, and there was a burst of pixelated static when it passed through the gate. All at once the static cleared and a well-lit room came into focus, multiple light sources and a window full of glare. A tiered dais led down from the gate, and on the floor were countless geometric figures and some sort of curlicue writing in concentric circles. To the left was a large pillar of some sort of crystal, the left was a broken stub, where John assumed a similar one would stand. There was an iron banded double door across the hall on the same wall that held the window, so that was probably the way outside. Another, smaller opening could be seen to the far left, presumably deeper into this facility that broke the laws of physics over its knee.

John watched the clip several times, and on the last play through he had made a few conclusions. There was an air of neglect to whole thing, with the broken pillar and the dusty floor. It was colder there, he assumed an atmosphere of similar pressure and make up as he wasn’t sucked in or pushed back by the portal or asphyxiating. Also, the portal wasn’t going to be permanent, if his guess was correct. Firstly there was damage in the facility and no operators, so it was probably running a pre-programmed sequence of some kind.

Which left John with a question. Did he want to make a possible one-way trip to a place he might likely die futilely, or take some video, call the car insurance and postpone his trip. Truly a deep and serious issue that would need lots of time to....

"Oh who am I kidding. Of course I'm going through the damn thing."

And with those immortal words John stepped into history as the first man dumb enough to jump through a portal without checking for oxygen.

Rule #2 Don’t poke Mystical Phenomena with your finger: Use a stick. For Science.