When Team Dragonsteel Got Lost (and Found) in Omega Mart

When you work at Dragonsteel, strange becomes normal. Impossible physics? Just another Tuesday. Other dimensions? That's what lunch breaks are for.

Let me tell you about the day Team Dragonsteel went grocery shopping in a place where reality bends, and how it taught us something unexpected about creativity itself.

The wonderfully talented Kellyn Neumann, our events director.

Normalcy Starts to Crack

The fluorescent lights hit different in Omega Mart. That's the first thing I noticed.

Emily Sanderson, the Queen herself, saw something else that stopped dead in her tracks just inside the entrance, a container of "What is Butter?" cradled in her hands."That's... strange," she said, turning the container over, which only led to more questions about the nature of butter itself, printed in cheerful (disturbing) comic sans. I watched her brow furrow. 

The Queen herself. 

We'd mic'd up a few members of our leadership team—Emily, Adam Horne (VP of Marketing), and Kara Stewart (VP of Merchandise)—hoping to capture their first reactions. What we got instead was a three-hour descent towards a surprising realization about the nature of creativity and where you should look to find it for yourself. (Hint: Brandon Sanderson already gave you the answer in his 2023 speech at the Defiant release event).

Skip to 18:45 for the referenced speech.

The Grocery Store That Wasn't

You might remember a couple of years ago when Brandon gave a speech on liminal spaces. If not, check it out above. He says, "It's specifically a traumatic transitional experience." Which makes sense, because if you think about liminal spaces, what responses do people have to them? They probably have a fight or flight response. Or, in many cases, just freeze entirely.

Standing in Omega Mart's produce section, watching Adam stare unblinking at a shelf of "Definitely Not Human Organs" (canned), I witnessed the latter.

Featuring Adam Horne considering egg carton shoes for his souvenir.  

The trauma of liminal spaces is subtle. It's the way your brain tries to make sense of a bottle labeled "Whale Song" that contains what looks like blue dish soap. It's the phone that started ringing next to Kara, which was an actual landline mounted to a pole in the middle of an aisle.

Kara picked up that phone like someone who'd done it a few times before (I asked, and she has). "Wait, Logan?!" Her voice pitched up, eyes widening. Through the mic, we caught the whole exchange: her team members, somehow already deeper in the complex, calling back through time. Or space. Or whatever sits between the two.

Through the Back Rooms

"Don't get so fixated on the endpoint that you miss the joys of the transition," Brandon had said at the Defiant release event. That had never felt more true than when I was walking through a neon-lit tunnel that seemed to breathe. I started thinking about this idea of the process. The process for anything—be that writing a story, working on a Cognitive Realm article, exercising, etcetera. 

I don’t think I’d ever felt such enjoyment in a transition as I did in that tunnel. The neon lights cascaded down the sides in such rapid succession that I could barely make out the pattern. The way the walls seemed to actively pulse with breath and life and something otherworldly. It felt inspiring and interesting, not a space I was actively trying to run from. But it was just that—a transition.

This reminded me of Sanderson's Outside.

The portals in Omega Mart were subtle, too. One of the most famous ones (you’ve probably seen it on social media) gaped in the wall behind the milk fridges, pulsing with a kind of light that had no business existing in our color spectrum. Emily went through first, because of course she did. That's what good leaders do—they crawl through interdimensional portals first. Obviously. The rest of us followed, and reality started to fray properly along with my previous understanding of how to enjoy the creative process.

The lovely Katy Ives, our mastermind events and design assistant, who apparently needs a little boost mid-week.

Braydonn Moore, another one of our incredibly talented events team members, found the fridge portal!

The Heart of the Maze

You know that moment in writing when you've gone so far down a plot hole that you can't see the surface anymore? Omega Mart's back rooms feel like that, but physical. Corridors split and rejoin like capillaries. Rooms full of impossible geometry make you question whether you ever really understood what corners were supposed to do.

Three hours in, we hit peak liminality. The walls were definitely breathing now. Kara had found another phone, this one broadcasting warnings about temporal anomalies. Emily had somehow acquired a scepter from a dead alien princess and completed her self-imposed cryptid-finding quest (final count: three).

This is where Brandon's words about blank pages hit me. "We'll never accomplish anything," he'd said, "if we don't learn to take the blank pages of our lives and fill them." I’m not sure there’s a better articulation of what Omega Mart’s many portals, passages, and for lack of better word, transitions felt like. Artists had filled the blank pages of this warehouse, and it was crystal clear that those creatives enjoyed the entire process because there wasn’t a stone left unturned. The mystery unfolded like an origami nightmare: a missing corporate heir, ancient aquatic aliens, psychedelic cave paintings that shifted when you tried to look directly at them. 

I realized, following Adam as he attempted to donate his essence to an alien portal of source energy, that I had never slowed down enough in my own creative process to create something so complete. So vibrant. So alive. Then I wondered if some of you might feel the same way, and like me, need a rewatch of Sanderson’s liminal spaces speech to remind yourself of why the seemingly mundane process of making things, the transition from doing to done, is so crucial.

Finding Our Way Back (Sort Of)

Reality reasserted itself slowly, like a limb waking up from pins and needles. We emerged changed. It wasn’t something profound or dramatic. It was a subtle thing that happens when you've spent hours questioning whether butter is really butter. Naturally.

And I was thinking more and more about how much Omega Mart made me think of a creative mind. Rooms that lead nowhere. Halls that go in the wrong direction. Puzzles with no solution. Art made just for the pure enjoyment of the creative process, to tell a story in the subconscious mind, as it is the space where creativity and inspiration come from. 

Found my souvenir.

The Checkout Counter

The artists who created Omega Mart built a monument to the creative process itself. Every twisted corridor and impossible room exists because someone chose to linger between idea and execution, to play there, to create there.

The blank page can be somewhere to live for a while, if you can learn how to lean into the pins and needles. For those of us who create, maybe the answer isn't to rush through the uncertain part of finding the right door, but being willing to open all of them. Even the ones behind the milk fridges. 

Stay tuned to The Cognitive Realm for more stories, insights, and adventures with Team Dragonsteel.