Run
Seized by an instinct that isn't entirely yours, your legs launch into sudden action like two coiled springs, and you bolt
away from the door so fast as your unfamiliar body can take you - stumbling, tripping, and almost falling over with each
step. You turn back and run into the corridor behind you, paying not a single glance over your shoulder as to what might
have caused the door to open.
It seems that the way winds on forever - endless, seamless panel after seamless panel, until your dizziness isn't entirely to
do with your earlier condition. Yet, still, you press on, until it seems that more than a minute has passed in fleeing
desperation. Just as your breath begins to burn in your chest, and you are feeling weaker and more disorientated than ever
before, your eyes latch upon another door with a panel not unlike the first one to the side of the way.
Frantically, and not paying mind to your foreign hands any longer, you skid to a halt and slam your palm against the panel
in the hope that it opens. For a long, long moment, nothing happens, and then there comes the noise of moving metal, as
the thing begins to rise, and you let out a held breath – stooping to squeeze beneath the opening so soon as it reaches a
height that you can manage. You spin around to slap an identical interface on the other side, before sinking against the
door with your chest huffing furiously as it closes once more, bringing the space into weakly lit darkness.
Pulse racing, and pace of breath struggling to slow down, you eventually manage to take yourself from the wall, and turn
around to look behind you. Though dim, there is just enough illumination for you to see into a space that is perhaps five
meters across and reasonably high, made from the same panels as the corridor outside, filled with stacks and stacks of
completely plain cardboard boxes, standing tall from floor to ceiling. However, most of them seem to have had their lids
roughly opened and be completely empty – almost as if what had been stored within had already been put to use, and this
was just the resulting trash afterwards.
Walking forward, still eyeing the door behind you with fear and caution, you feel your forehead grow incredibly damp
with sweat from a mixture of stress and tentative relief. Raising a hand automatically, your fraught nerves jump as instead
of simply brushing moisture from your skin, your strange new hands impact against something protruding in it's way -
resulting in a jolt of pain that shoots through your face. Ouch.
Freezing in place between two tall towers of boxes, you halt and reach up to your face in abject horror, growing both
increasingly more shocked, and yet also more utterly resigned at what you feel. Fur. A lean, athletic, male body. A long,
pointed muzzle, finishing in a wet nose. You glance down at your body, and behind the black tracksuit which was most
certainly not what you had been wearing before putting on this costume, you swallow upon a dry throat as you catch the
dark sight of something swirling behind you in no particular rhythm. A tail. Had something been done to you, in this
strange, futuristic place, or was this something to do with what had happened, what you had felt back in that dusty old
room?
Shaking your head – now newly discovered to be topped with sensitive, twitchy, fur-covered ears - perhaps the reason that
the sound of your footsteps had given you a pounding headache – you push on, refusing to delay and panic with someone
or something possibly on your tail. The stacks of boxes proved hard to navigate, moving on, but you gently shove your
way through nonetheless, being very careful as to not knock any over and make a noise that could be audible through the
door as you do so.
After about half a minute of doing so, you come to the other side of the space, and through the last mountains of
cardboard. Much as you had expected, there appears to be nothing more than the plain and unadorned wall marking the
end of the room here, however in one corner there lies a vent cover, seemingly concealing a passage about as tall as one of
the boxes stacked beside it. A possible escape, then, but it is a difficult decision, even so. Perhaps the hatch leads nowhere,
but there is only one other way out, and it was back out into the corridor where you had run from.
Written by Doppelfoxx on 28 January 2022
