RIGHT
You grit your foreign feeling teeth, and make your decision as quickly as your fear and body’s
reluctance to move allows. Pushing on, you feel sweat begin to form beneath your suddenly all-toothick pelt, despite the fact that the air around you isn’t all that hot. In a way, the moisture made it
easier for you to continue onwards, now sliding somewhat through the vent, making more progress
with time as the shape of the metal changes, and you get used to the strange pattern of motion that
works best.
As you pressed on, however, your sweat soon wasn’t only due to the fur upon your body, as you
notice the temperature around you rise noticeably. Before you can think of it much, however, your
head bumps against hard metal. A dead end. Great. Now you have to go back all the way you came,
and wasn’t that going to be fun.
Turning around, you try to angle your legs in a way that allows you to swivel, and place your foot
onto one of the plates of metal to the side of the vent to do so. However, this piece, unlike the others
you had been walking on, didn’t seem to have support beneath it. You hold your breath, and slow
your pace, trying your best to put as little weight as you can down. I’ll have to be careful here.
Creeping forward, you press up against the roof, cringing with each crunch, but determined to
continue and get back to safety. One step in particular makes an unfortunate dent, pushing part of
your knee into the metal, and buckling it out the other side. The noise of pained metal makes you
freeze, but the damage has apparently already been done. The crunching continues, and you feel the
floor beneath you giving way with a gut-wrenching sensation, leaving you little time to contemplate
your danger before you are thrown backwards out of balance, and the panel drops out altogether,
causing you to slip down into what you can only assume is a pipe or vent not unlike the one you had
been crawling in.
The fall itself was thankfully not that painful, thanks to the surprisingly soft landing. Out of interest,
once you righted yourself, you sit up and begin to take in your surroundings. It seemed that you had
fallen through the thin slit that made up the ceiling, and the walls around it continued in a roundish
shape that fit snugly to the filled basket-like shape that you sat in now, nursing your sore-ish,
exhausted body.
The things within mainly look like trash – pieces of cloth, plastic things, and other such
miscellaneous items – but occasionally you catch a glimpse of something shiny and small poking
out, like a kind of metal. One is quite near to you, and so you rustle through the paper around it to
pull it free and hold it in your hands. Some kind of circuit board.
Just then, as you replace it tenderly, you see something else, just beneath everything that you
pushed out of the way; white, with round knobs, and a long, spindled form.
Bones.
You start back in disgust and horror, clambering backwards on all fours reversed, trying everything
to get distance between yourself and whatever unpleasant matter remained to be discovered beneath
what you had already seen. What is this place?
Huffing and puffing with a fear ten times greater than that you had experienced in the room above,
you glance around, more desperate than ever to find a way to escape. However, before you can even
complete one full scan of the space around you, you feel a deep, powerful shake beneath you, and
your stomach drops as you felt the entire basket begin to rotate in place, pushing you up against the
side that you had leant against. You grip the sides, but it’s already too late, and before long you feel
yourself and everything else around you begin to shift and spill as the bucket turns on its head into a
metal cylinder.
You get one, short glance downwards as your body tumbles through the air, and your scream chokes
to a terrified halt as the bright flash and lick of fire catches your eye, deep down below yet growing
ever closer. Thanks to the long plummet, you don’t feel much of the impact, let alone the flames.
Not long after, there isn’t much left of you at all.
Why? Where is this? Who did this? Questions that you never answered.
Written by Doppelfoxx on 12 August 2022
The end (for now)