Exploring
It had been part of the reason that you'd made fun of the genie in the way that you had... because you weren't sure of yourself.
You had a feeling that if there were men in here that had once been human, they might have been feeling a little insecure... which would mean that they wouldn't take kindly to you telling them what was going on, what you were going to have to do.
Demanding that you work together on a way to escape.
Was there even a way to escape? You keep yourself close to the bars, because at least here you can't see the others. You'll worry about that later... but for now, you just want to assess how deep you really are into this situation. Your eyes look up, they look around. The bars of the enclosure stretch for as far as you can see -- it loops around you in a great dome, so even if you can figure out how to work the wings that you feel stretching and fluttering along your back, you're fairly certain that you can't just fly out of here.
You turn to the bars then, and gently paw at it with one claw; it's just as solid and thick as it looks. Metal; something darker than steel... something that you know you aren't going to be able to break down.
And more than that, the space that had looked like so much when you first glanced it isn't even enough for you to shoulder through. You can tell from looking.
You don't try, because the people on the other side of the bars are standing right there, and you aren't yet sure what would happen if you misbehaved.
There is so much information about what's happening to you that you don't have, and it makes everything so much more difficult to navigate. You don't know if there's some kind of keeper that you can at least ask questions to... or if they can understand you either. You're left without any clue or inclination as to what you can and cannot do... and you're left with the knowledge that there's no way for you to simply do what you would have done when you were a human; pull out a cellphone and Google what the actual answer was.
You pace instead, walking along the front length of the bars and checking to see if there are any wider openings, any weaknesses that you might notice. When you see none here, you continue to walk along the length of the enclosure. You keep your eyes on the metal, but you also keep them sweeping out in front of you, looking around you. The last thing that you want is to accidentally run into one of the other occupants of the cage without realizing what you're walking up on. You don't have enough information yet.
You're not ready for that yet.
You honestly don't know if you'll ever be ready.
You don't want to admit that your body is trembling slightly, even though there's no one here who would make fun of you for it. The temperature is perfectly controlled, so it isn't as though you could blame it on that... and you know that the only person that you're trying to fool is yourself.
And you aren't even a person anymore.
You're a sphynx... and you're beginning to accept that this isn't a nightmare that you're going to be able to rouse yourself from. This is your situation, and you are going to have to figure out how to navigate it if you have any hope of reversing what happened.
But can you reverse it? There's an odd, sinking sensation in the pit of your stomach that tells you that you can't. Wherever you are, the people looking in on the bars are decidedly not human; they're the wrong color. Even if you could somehow escape, would you ever be able to find that Genie again, or another being that was magical and capable of reversing what had happened to you?
All of it was impossible. Overwhelming and crushingly impossible.
You keep trudging along the edge of the enclosure, hoping that somehow you'll find bars that are bent, or spread further apart... maybe some expanse in the sky that you'll be able to fly up to.
Written by Karlyene on 08 October 2020