Chapter 1 — The Map That Doesn’t Exist

Delusionville:

Prologue: Geometry in Blood

The first thing Joey “Fasthands” Marquez remembered was the triangle.

Not an ordinary triangle—this one burned behind his eyelids whenever he blinked, pulsing with neon edges that bent, folded, and expanded into impossible fractals. Inside it spun a circle. Inside that, a cube. Inside that, a thousand screaming faces, all demanding something he couldn’t understand.

It wasn’t a dream. Joey had swallowed enough DMT in his life to recognize the difference between a hallucination and a message. And this was a message.

The triangle whispered one word:

Delusionville.

And then the gunfire started.

Scene One: Desert at Gunpoint

The Nevada desert was a graveyard of UFO crash conspiracies and mob burial sites. Joey tore through it on a wheezing motorcycle, the engine coughing up black smoke, the speedometer stuck at 111—always 111, as if mocking him. Behind him, three SUVs howled like steel wolves, headlights carving the dust storm into strobes of death.

The men inside wore suits too clean for this world. Corporate hitmen. Sleeves rolled up, sunglasses glued to their skulls even at midnight. They fired in perfect sync, muzzle flashes lighting the desert in sacred patterns: three shots, pause, three shots. Joey swore he saw geometry in the bullets, each one tracing a star-tetrahedron in the air before slicing past his head.

“Not tonight,” Joey growled, twisting the throttle until the bike screamed like it was ripping its own soul out.

A bullet grazed his cheek. Blood sprayed across the windshield, catching the moonlight. For a second, Joey saw the blood droplets arrange themselves into a perfect mandala before evaporating into the desert heat.

“Great,” Joey muttered. “Now my own DNA is into geometry.”

Scene Two: Welcome to Delusionville

The motorcycle sputtered, gasping, out of fuel. Joey kicked it sideways into a skid, sparks flying as rubber burned off the wheels. He shot off the saddle, tumbled through sand and glass, and landed face-first in the cracked pavement of a town that wasn’t supposed to exist.

Neon signs flickered. A Ferris wheel turned with no electricity. Music leaked from nowhere—lounge jazz, distorted and warped.

A crooked sign spun overhead:

WELCOME TO DELUSIONVILLE. POPULATION: WHO’S COUNTING?

Behind him, the SUVs screeched to a halt. Doors flew open. Twelve men stepped out in eerie unison, guns raised, faces blank as mannequins.

And then everything paused.

Literally—paused.

The hitmen froze in mid-step. Bullets that had been fired hung motionless in the air like glittering beads of mercury. Joey spun around, wide-eyed, realizing time itself had jammed.

That’s when she appeared.

Scene Three: The Woman in Pink Geometry

She walked barefoot out of the alley, wrapped in a silk coat patterned with glowing hexagons. Her eyes weren’t eyes—they were twin galaxies, black holes spinning at the center of violet storms.

“You made it,” she said, voice dripping like honey through a vocoder. “Not many do.”

“Made it where?” Joey asked, clutching his side, blood still seeping from the graze.

She smiled, and the neon lights bent toward her. “Delusionville. The knot in the string. The place where every failed reality gets dumped like cosmic trash. Sacred geometry’s recycling bin.”

Joey blinked. “And you are…?”

“Roxy. Velvet Roxy. I’ll explain later. Right now, you need to run. Time’s about to start moving again.”

As if on cue, the bullets hanging in the air quivered. Joey dove. Roxy grabbed his hand. Together, they sprinted into the labyrinth of Delusionville’s alleys as the universe hit play.

Scene Four: The Alley of Teeth

The alleys weren’t alleys. They were arteries. Bloodstained bricks pulsed as though alive, graffiti shifting in sacred spirals that changed whenever you weren’t looking. Symbols of Metatron’s Cube, Flower of Life, and hypercubes bled across the walls.

“This town…” Joey gasped between breaths. “…this town isn’t real.”

“Define real,” Roxy said, tossing a grenade over her shoulder. It exploded, showering the hitmen in shards of glass teeth. “Delusionville is as real as the bad decisions that built it. You’ve been here before, you just don’t remember.”

Joey tripped over a beggar who wasn’t a beggar at all, but an alien with translucent skin, its organs glowing like jellyfish. It muttered in clicks and whistles before vaporizing into a puff of smoke.

“I’m hallucinating,” Joey whispered.

“No,” Roxy snapped. “You’re just finally sober.”

Scene Five: The Mayor

Every story in Delusionville led to one place: The Legislative Branch.

It wasn’t city hall. It was a strip club the size of a cathedral, built on top of a subway system that had never been constructed. Neon crucifixes flashed in sync with basslines, dancers swung from trapezes into infinity mirrors, and the air was thick with incense, cocaine, and interstellar pheromones.

And at the center of it all sat Mayor Crankshaft.

Seven feet tall. Face carved from scars. Hands plated with iron bones. On his lap: a hookah bubbling with DMT, each exhale birthing new geometries into the air.

Roxy dragged Joey into the main hall, ignoring the rain of champagne bottles crashing from balconies.

“Mayor,” she purred, bowing theatrically. “I brought you a stray.”

Crankshaft’s golden eyes locked onto Joey. He grinned like a shark that just smelled blood.

“New blood,” the Mayor said. His voice shook the room like thunder. “I like new blood.”

Scene Six: Deals with the Devil

The Mayor didn’t ask questions. He demanded chaos.

“You run,” Crankshaft said. “They chase. The city eats you alive. Or…” He leaned forward, exhaling sacred smoke into Joey’s face. Joey’s vision instantly fractured into kaleidoscopic hellscapes: pyramids aligning with Orion, Atlantean ruins sinking beneath oceans, jesters juggling galaxies. “…you work for me.”

Joey coughed, blinking away fractals. “Work… how?”

“A heist,” Crankshaft grinned. “Vesperelli’s casino vault. I want it empty by sunrise. You’ve got Roxy, Needles, Doc, and The Twins. That’s all you get. Succeed, and you’re Delusionville’s golden boy. Fail…” He cracked his iron fists together, sparks flying. “…and your bones join the geometry in my walls.”

Joey had no choice.

Scene Seven: Flashbacks in Fractals

On the way out, Joey staggered into a bathroom mirror. His reflection wasn’t his reflection. It was a film reel of his past lives, cut together like a Tarantino montage.

  • Joey as a child, drawing pentagrams in the dirt without knowing why.

  • Joey as a teenager, stealing a mobster’s car and finding alien glyphs etched into the trunk.

  • Joey on his first DMT trip, meeting machine elves who whispered: Run toward Delusionville.

  • Joey dying in an alley six years ago… then waking up, alive, with no memory.

The mirror cracked into seven shards. In each shard, a different Joey stared back—smirking, screaming, bleeding, laughing.

“Shit,” Joey whispered. “I’m not even me anymore.”

The shards whispered back in unison:

You never were.

Scene Eight: The Crew

Roxy assembled the team in an abandoned roller rink lit only by ultraviolet graffiti.

  • Needles Malone twitched as he oiled a safe-drill, scars zig-zagging like lightning bolts across his skin. He laughed at nothing, then at everything, then at nothing again.

  • Doc Holidaye sat slumped against a pinball machine, flask in one hand, surgical saw in the other. He smelled like whiskey and iodine.

  • The Twins leaned silently in the corner, identical in every way except for the way they spun their knives. They never spoke, but everyone swore they could read minds.

Joey looked around. “This is suicide.”

Roxy smirked. “Exactly. Welcome to Delusionville.”

Scene Nine: The Geometry of Heists

The Mirage Inferno Casino loomed on the horizon, shaped like a pyramid but bent at impossible angles, each corner glowing with alien glyphs. Its architecture shifted whenever you blinked, a living labyrinth built by both mobsters and cosmic tricksters.

Needles licked his lips. “That vault isn’t locked with steel. It’s locked with geometry. I’ve seen the blueprints. The combination’s not numbers—it’s shapes. Triangles within circles within cubes. You mess up, it doesn’t stay shut. It eats you.”

“Eats you?” Joey asked.

“Like a black hole with teeth.”

Scene Ten: Enter Don Vesperelli

Inside the casino, the mob king Don Vesperelli sat at a roulette table, stroking a revolver plated in meteorite silver. His bodyguards weren’t human. Their suits bulged with reptilian scales, eyes glowing amber beneath their shades.

Vesperelli sipped an espresso, unmoved by the chaos. “Delusionville always sends me toys,” he murmured, rolling the roulette wheel. The ball landed on 0. Always 0. “Let’s see how long this one lasts.”

(to be continued in Chapter Two…)