Awake
What feels like a long, long time later, your senses come back to you. You feel yourself laying flat on your back upon a
hard, cold surface that is very much definitely not the wooden floor of the room you had been in earlier.
After some time, your eyes blink open groggily, feeling caked with sleep and almost stuck together. Gross. However, at
first all is still dark, and you question whether you had actually opened your eyes at all. After a few seconds there comes a
tinkling crackle, and with it a row of sparking light arcs across the ceiling in long, thick rows - fluorescent lights of some
kind.
Shielding your face momentarily from the suddenly intense glare, you squint tightly, propping yourself up from what you
can only assume to be the ground with one arm, and feeling a surge of nausea at even this slight movement. By the time
you muster the strength to open your eyes fully, a few minutes pass, and you aren't feeling any better – regarding your
surroundings with a blurry, weak gaze.
The floors are a dark, deep, and glossy black that connects seamlessly with walls of pearlescent white to either side of
you. Behind where you had been laying, there seems to be a corridor of the same material that leads on indefinitely, and
on the other end before you there stands a grayish paneled door that seemed something like the roller on a garage. What is
this place? How did I get here?
Slowly, squeezing your lids shut once more, you struggle to your feet, swaying to balance upon legs that feel strangely
unfamiliar. There, beside the door, there is a panel, and above it a blinking red light. Staggering forward, you raise your
hand out, hoping perhaps that it will switch the painful lights off, so that you may recover in peace. However, before you
can even touch the panel, vision still too blurry to make out much, you nonetheless notice something very, very unusual,
that causes you to stagger back with some violence, sending your head into another set of aching spins. Those... aren’t
human...
These things attached to your body, covered in fur and strangely joined, somehow aren’t as agile as your usual fingers...
or perhaps you simply just don’t know how to use them yet. As you glance at them, however, something odd becomes
very clear. At the termination of each pad, there lays slightest indent, and when you clench your fist, there they are, as
your dawning horror had expected. Claws. For a moment, your mouth drops open, and your mind flounders uselessly.
What has happened to me?Is this all just a bad dream?
Before you can sink any deeper into terror and shock, however, there comes a loud noise from just in front of you - dark,
loud, and metallic, causing a jolt to run through your heart, and your feet to jump in lpace on the floor. The door appears
to be shifting, and the light next to it has gone a bright green, as if announcing that it will soon be opening. A new level of
adrenaline pumps into your brain, and your feet tingle with the instinct to flee, knowing that if caught like this in a body
you do not understand, you will likely not be able to defend yourself at all - not that you would have been, were you in
your natural form, even so - you’re not exactly a pinnacle of martial form.
Body beyond rational command, and motion completely at the call of your shredding nerves, as the space beneath the
rising door grows larger and larger, you...
Written by Doppelfoxx on 27 January 2022
