Once you know unworldly things exist, everyday life seems insignificant and boring. Escaping the blade of Achilles was exciting, but I knew there was a greater rush waiting for me.

Unfortunately, Google doesn't index supernatural portals so I had to do some investigating. I spoke with thrill seekers, adrenaline junkies, and extreme sports athletes. I got no where. So I thought about the most intense places for any given sport or activity. There was the Inga Rapids for Kayaking. Check, no portal. There was Mount Everest for BASE jumping. Check, no portal. There was the Cave of Swallows for spelunking. Check, portal to the underworld. That leaves Samaesan Hole for diving, the Isle of Men for racing, and Biarritz for surfing. I have always loved surfing.
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Waves rolled under me as I waited for the monster because I knew if it was going to be a portal it had to be the largest wave of the day. An hour after I paddled out into the Bay of Biscay, it happened. The water beneath me sank as the wall of salty seawater rose behind me, and my instincts turned my arms like windmills in what could quickly become my final resting place.

I felt my legs lift as my face turned towards the surface, and hands immediately found the sides of my board and propelled my body to an upright position. The fear overwhelmed my senses, but my legs stayed steady as they turned my board to the left. I was on top of the world slowly descending into what I hoped was another world.

The run was long, and I glided across the surface of the wave for hundreds of feet before the crest enveloped me, and I found myself being pulled backwards on the water. The excitement overtook the fear, and I crouched down and grasped both sides of my board.

As the water surrounded me, I realized I would enter another world either through a portal or through death. I prayed for the former.

Then the world disappeared. I don't mean it went black – the environment literally disappeared – I was floating in the abyss. Until a disembodied voice whispered, "Welcome to Marenite," and an entire world built itself around me. The roads manifested as if they were being drawn sprouting nouns all along the way.

People, places, things continued to materialize around me until the entire void had been occupied. There were seaweed skyscrapers that created a Tetris-like cityscape in the distance, and shell huts lined the octopus-like roads. This otherworld seemed fairly tame until the ruler, Squevil, rose from the coral floor. Squevil towered over me on tentacles blocking the source of light, and as the darkness covered me like a blanket I saw it's face, which held two jellyfish for eyes, a Spirula squid for a nose, and rows of turritella shells for teeth.

I felt as though I were surrounded by water, but I could breath and move as on land. So I ran. I made it about  hundred yards before I felt the tightening grip and tentacle suckers around my ankle and the hard, cold coral on the side of my face. I knew fighting was futile and, after all, adventure is what I wanted so I let my body go limp, and the creature raised me to his horrid face.

"What have shown your face in Marenite?" He said, extending every 's' sound and exposing the bundle of sea snakes that formed his tongue. "This land belongs to me – Squevil. Shouldn't you be on the surface with the other mortals?" The bundle extended far enough with each hissing 's' for the snakes to snap at my face but not close enough for them to get me.

"I was surfing and..."

"Silence! My questions do not require answers. I know all because I am all. I am the sea that covers the Earth. I am the liquid that falls from the sky. I am the water that runs through your cells." Squevil forced the final word into a devilishly long hiss allowing the snakes to reach my face.

No pain. I barely felt thousands of little pressure points on my face as I hung upside down with my eyes closed as tightly as they would go and my breath refusing to leave my lungs. Suddenly, I was falling to the surface in a slow descent.

"Good luck, sucker," Squevil laughed as he started to swim away.

"Wait! What do you mean?"

"You have four hours to find the anti-venom in this world or you will die. I'll be watching as the neurotoxins slowly take your sanity." With that he was gone.

I traveled the world finding doors closed at every turn and the jellyfish eyes of Squevil appearing at every increasing symptom until I couldn't move. There I was on the floor of Marenite waiting to die, regretting my thirst for adventure when darkness once again surrounded me.

"You have failed the test. You are not worthy of the honor I was to offer you. You see, I grow tired of watching and knowing all without the ability to take action. I need someone on the surface who will carry out my treachery across the globe. I have been watching you on the rapids, the mountains, the caves, and I felt certain you were the one. But alas you are not." Squevil floated away slowly, but stopped long enough to offer a piece of advice, "Enjoy your death. It only comes once."

His words strengthen my resolve and my muscles. I moved my head quickly around searching for anything that could be the antidote until my eyes landed on a pink substance barely visible under a rock about fifty yards away. I took in as much air as I could and threw my right side over my left until I was rolling towards the rock. My head landed beside the pink substance and my mouth consumed it as quickly as it could. Just as in the Underworld, my eyes faded to black, and I woke up in my room.