This is a very silly work of space fantasy isekai commissioned by and written for @shaderic...
Intercessor (AKA Kemonomimi Yuri Space Fantasy)
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Chapter 1: The Arkology (I)
This is a very silly work of space fantasy isekai commissioned by and written for @shaderic.
Chapter 1: The Arkology (I)
In my defense, I hadn't actually been trying to get hit by a truck.
The first hint that something was off was the smell. Or, more precisely, the lack of it.
It didn't immediately occur to me that I should've been anywhere else aside from the dubious comfort of my cheap mattress. Therefore, as I woke and stretched and moaned and did all the necessary things to rouse myself from among the sleeping dead, it wasn't quite until I opened my eyes that I realized something was off.
Because the ceiling I was looking up at was clearly not my own. It was white and too clean. It lacked a ceiling fine, serpentine cracks running across, that weird brownish-red stain in the corner I'd always been too afraid to touch even with cleaning gloves. And it definitely wasn't supposed to be comprised of smooth, spotless white metallic panels.
Then the realization set in, and I bolted up in my bed. Or, really, "my bed". Quotation marks because, first, it wasn't mine - a fact I discovered as I looked down and yelped and fell out of it like an idiot - and second, it didn't look like a bed. In fact, it looked more like the kind of pods space people in the future sleep in, where you're either floating in some kind of liquid or frozen. I'm not really a nerd, but I've seen enough sci-fi things simply through the sheer power of pop culture osmosis. And speaking of sci-fi...
The room I was in was brightly lit, about the size of a high school classroom, and was similarly comprised of those spotless, white, grooved metallic panels, save for what seemed like a futuristic-looking screen here or some kind of black super advanced machinery I couldn't identify there. All things I would've described better had I any idea what they even were, all the markings of a super far-flung future that belonged in a sci-fi film.
Which probably meant I had been abducted by a secret government cabal. And definitely meant I was suddenly very, very far from home.
I thus felt it was entirely appropriate for the next three words that came out of my mouth to be "what", "the", and something rather impolite, roughly in that order.
I spent a while sitting frozen on my ass like a little pussy and gauging my surroundings before coming to the conclusion that there wasn't going to be a distorted voice on unseen speakers going "I want to play a game".
"Hello?" I called out as I walked down large, wide corridors, halls, and chambers, my voice - which I hoped sounded inquisitive rather than scared shitless- echoing off too-clean walls in the empty silence.
The good news, for better or for worse, was that I still had all my clothes: A cheap suit-blouse-skirt in slightly mismatched colors, picked up at a garage sale where a middle-aged woman had kindly offered me a pity discount until it became clear I intended to haggle down from even that. So no one had undressed me and put me in fetish wear yet. Not exactly a particularly optimistic outlook, but it's sort of amazing to see the twists and turns your brain makes when you want to look for any hint of comfort in an alien situation.
Speaking of aliens, I had probably been kidnapped by them. That was my revised assessment after I finally became half-convinced that the room I woke up in wasn't some kind of death trap, and that it was okay to get off my ass and explore. That, or I'd sleepwalked onto a truly humongous set for Hollywood's next multi-million dollar sci-fi blockbuster. Or, like I said in the beginning, I'd actually been kidnapped by the government and sent to a high-tech facility like Area 51 or something.
The first possibility was stupid, only slightly credible in the mind of a scared little shit like me. The second was a bit more probable until you realized that - seeing how everything here was actually made of metallic substances and glass instead of cardboard and green screens and CGI - this was well beyond the budget of even Hollywood. The third was most probable on its face, save for the fact that I was more likely to have been kidnapped by aliens looking for random test subjects than I was of government interest.
The architectural theme largely repeated itself as I walked further and further, surrounded by black metallic walls largely covered over by large white metallic panels that were so clean and pristine that they were almost semi-reflective. This minimalist design was sometimes complemented with gold-colored highlights that might've been wrought from real gold for all I knew, all well-illuminated by nothing in particular; there were no obvious major sources of light, nothing like a fixture or a lamp or even a spotlight, almost as if the architecture itself radiated luminescence. There were, of course, tinier sources of light, like the power indicator on devices that looked like computers but had no obvious interface or screen and did not respond to my attempts to press anything that looked like a power button. Not to mention glass panels, futuristic-looking furniture that resembled tables and chairs, barriers here that looked like railings and barriers there that looked like computer consoles embedded into the architecture, and little decorative details that seemed to suggest whoever designed this place didn't want it to look drab and soulless. Certainly, there was a simplistic elegance to it, the place looking less like an empty canvas and more like it was itself a work of art.
Not that it changed the fact that this place was huge and creepily deserted. "Hello?" I called out for what felt like the hundredth time for who knows how long. Hours, at least, but I didn't know how many; I didn't wear a watch, my phone was missing, and there were no clocks. Or perhaps there were no clocks I could recognize.
Nor was I keeping track of how many doors I had passed through at this point. Sure, the fact that there were sliding doors - terrifyingly thick metallic barriers that glided open soundlessly, the kind you'd think you'd find only in military bases or secret government labs researching the zombie virus - was, almost bizarrely, a source of relief: There was a familiarity about it that reminded me of supermarkets. But at this point, I was almost certain that I had passed through at least a hundred different rooms, hallways, corridors, chambers, and passageways in this unholy maze. Save for corridors that were nonetheless about as wide as two-lane streets, the rooms were all invariably large, or at least large by the standards of a poor person, ranging in size from "high school classroom" like the room I woke up in to "Las Vegas hotel lobby", not that I'd ever been in one. I had no good frame of reference, but given how long I had been walking and how much my feet was starting to ache, I was convinced that I long passed "baseball stadium" territory and was in danger of surpassing "Disneyland" on the scale of hugeness as well.
There were signs that people were supposed to have lived here once; I could, at least, recognize chairs, tables, desks, and similar pieces of furniture, sculpted in the same futuristic minimalist style as the rooms. And after what felt like hours of walking, I passed by at least two more rooms that resembled the one I woke up in, complete with those weird futuristic pods that looked like sci-fi beds. But no one was in them, nor were there any hints that anyone had been in them recently. And even at what felt like a hundredth-plus-one "hello", there was still no response but the echo of my own voice.
I started to tremble. It wasn't particularly cold - air conditioning, if there was such a thing here, must've be set to a comfortable temperature - but there was a very real fear given the...nothingness. Things could've been worse, but even though I didn't seem to be at risk of any particular harm, that I was here with no tools, no explanation, and no people was inherently terrifying.
Equally terrifying was the suddenly realization that I wasn't entirely sure - now that I had spent hours exploring - how to get back to the room I woke up in. There was no actual rational reason for me to go back, seeing how all of these rooms had a similar level of utility for me - that is to say none - but I must've been put in that specific room within that specific pod for a reason, right? If anyone was ever going to come along after having deposited me there - even if they were aliens who just wanted to stick an anal probe in me or something - surely that's where they'd come looking for me, right?
...Right?
It was another few hours when I finally got back to "my" room, a little breathless from frayed nerves, the anxiety of the possibility of never being able to make it back having weighed rather heavily on my mind. I managed not to hyperventilate, something I would've felt more proud of had circumstances been different. For better or for worse, the room was exactly as I had remembered it, untouched and unchanged. Which was both relieving and depressing. Relieving in the sense of me going back to my room after spending the entire day worrying someone had broken into it, only to find out that there's no sign of such whatsoever, save for the fact that this wasn't my room. Depressing in the sense that, of course, I'm still alone.
I'd spent the last few years of my life being something of a loner, so it felt almost pathetic as to how starved for company I was at the moment. It hadn't even been an entire day.
At least, I thought it was an entire day. It's hard to tell, what with the whole "being stuck indoors with no windows or clocks".
It had just occurred to me that I was growing hungry when a slot at the bottom of the thick doors to "my" "bedroom" - I actually wasn't sure it was a bedroom - slid open, something that actually made me turn around in shock and alarm and anticipation; was someone finally here, someone I could talk to and get answers out of?
But in scooted in what I could only describe as a futuristic Roomba, sliding across the pristine floor. And on it was...a tray, actually. At least, it certainly resembled a cafeteria tray, albeit stocked with what seemed like blocks wrapped in a plastic wrapper, the kind of packaging you might've expected for a block of butter at a supermarket.
Tentatively, I picked up the tray, wanting to give its contents a closer look, trying to figure out if this was actually a tray of food...and then the Roomba-like device - I'm just going to call it a Roomba - suddenly slid away towards the open slot in the door. "Wait!" I called out, half-hoping - and half-dreading - that the Roomba was actually sentient.
No good. It ignored me completely and disappeared under the door before the slot slid shut. I rushed after it nonetheless, waiting for the doors to slide open as I reached it, but by the time they opened, the Roomba was long gone.
Scowling at my unsuccessful attempt to befriend a Roomba and at the fact that I had been attempting to befriend a Roomba, I returned to my bed and the discarded tray left there. The blocks of food were still there - at least I assumed it was food - still wrapped tightly like something on a supermarket shelf. I didn't plan on going hungry if I could help it - I had a longstanding grudge with hunger - but peeling open the wrapper was admittedly a half-hearted affair; the unwrapped block inside looked brown and nondescript, odorless and textureless. I couldn't help but think that what I held in my hand was what would happen if you threw a granola bar into a blender and tried to turn it back into a granola bar.
I also had no way of ascertaining whether or not what I held in my hand was poisonous - or if it would cause me diarrhea - but hunger sucked, so I took a tentative bite.
...It actually didn't taste too bad. A little salty, which I didn't quite expect. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, honestly. I couldn't really place the taste, and maybe hunger was playing a role here, but I wasn't instantly spitting the part I nibbled out of my mouth in disgust, so that nibble turned into a bite. And several bites and unwrapped plastic peels later, I had not died from poison.
So the food was safe to eat and - although entirely boring - was largely not utterly revolting. Hooray.
Speaking of diarrhea, I was pleased - at least as pleased as I could be under the circumstances - that there was a bathroom at the back of the room. That allowed me to wash up with warm water - coming in two varieties, clear and soaped - and relieve myself. Fortunately, unlike the pod-like bed, the weirdest thing I could say about the bathroom was how automated everything was. The faucet I expected, but warm water coming out of the shower the moment I stepped in was a surprise, although given there were no obvious knobs or buttons, I suppose I should've saw that coming.
So if this was some kind of super high-tech facility where confused inmates were subject to weird social or psychological experiments - like, if I was later expected to fight ninety-nine other people I didn't even know were in this facility to begin with, and to the death at that - then at least I got to spend my days in relative comfort, with weird but functional food, running water and toiletries, a clean "bedroom", and - of course - a bed. At least, if that's what you called the weird science fiction pod thing I was lying on. In. Whatever.
"Alright," I muttered to no one in particular, except possibly the ceiling above where I was lying down in the aforementioned "bed", "you're trapped in a giant base in the future. You have no idea where you are, you have no idea how to get out, and your only company is a space Roomba that feeds you.
"Got any bright ideas?"
Roughly four days had passed, and I came to several conclusions.
I had, of course, absolutely no faith in my conclusions, nor in the assumption that four days had passed, but that's beside the point. Is that my first conclusion? I'll say that's my first conclusion.
The second was that unless this was some kind of experiment as to how much boredom a human being could tolerate, this place was probably well and truly abandoned, for one reason or another. Everything was still automated, which meant that while my hunger needs were being seen to by some kind of supercomputer - at least for now - it also meant until I could find a way out of this place, there was no one I could talk to. No weapons that I could find either, reducing the possibility that I was being set up to fight ninety-nine other abductees. Almost strangely, I wasn't sure how to feel about that.
I had hoped that by tugging on the thread that was the Roomba, I could at least figure out whether or not there was actually someone hidden away in another room, toying with me through the power of a remote control. I "ambushed" the Roomba bringing me my meal by clinging onto it, preventing it from fleeing without me...except the Roomba ended up having much more torque than I thought. As a result, I was pulled along the floor screaming in terror before the Roomba slid into a small slit under the wall. A small slit that I couldn't fit through, so - obviously - I slammed into the wall very ungracefully.
That actually caused me to roll on the floor for a full minute, writhing like I had stubbed my toe. I'll remember that, you little Roomba.
Third conclusion: Getting out of here was going to be a problem. I had already known that this place was mind-bogglingly huge. To test just how huge it actually was, on the third day, after the little Roomba handed me my meal - and after I had failed to catch it again - I tried to walk in as much of a straight line through a series of rooms as possible, leaving crumbs from my food where I made turns, almost like Hansel and Gretel, if Hansel and Gretel were stuck in a science fiction facility and were actually nineteen-years-old.
This method worked great, actually. I felt pretty good about myself as I started my return trip to my room, except that was when I realized that the bloody Roomba was cleaning up all the crumbs I had left behind.
So the space Roomba was actually a Roomba. I again attempted to chase it down - albeit this time in frustrated anger rather than desperate curiosity - only for it to flee and lead me to another abrupt kinetic visit into a wall while it slid into a slot at the bottom.
Clearly, the space Roomba was fast becoming my greatest enemy in this facility.
Finding the way back to "my" room afterwards was a difficult exercise, and the fact that I managed it actually made me feel pretty good about my own abilities at pathfinding. It did mean, however, that long excursions from my room were out of the question unless I developed a strong familiarity with my local surroundings...or unless I got creative with my pathfinding.
The space Roomba eventually came back with what I assumed was dinner. Previously, it had waited for me to take the tray from atop it before darting off; this time, it hit the brakes the moment it came through the slot underneath the giant double sliding doors. The tray of space food subsequently slipped off the space Roomba, slid across the floor, and came to a halt at my feet where I was seated on a chair. It then turned around and fled through the slit in the door before I could even get up and give chase.
I was becoming increasingly sure that the space Roomba was sentient and screwing with me.
Back when I had still been in college, some student activists had come up to me and started talking about the prison system and how we needed to fight against solitary confinement, which was apparently a form of torture. Something that had always stuck out to me in that half-minute of our interaction was how human minds are just not meant to cope with isolation, with the absence of any human interaction, and that permanent psychological damage can be seen in as little as fifteen days.
Of course, at the time, I had told the girl - more politely, and in different words - that I was broke and already busting my ass trying to graduate, so please piss off.
Oh, incidentally, I had no way to tell aside from hoping that my sleep schedule in any way still resembled a twenty-four-hour clock, but I suspected it was just about fifteen days at that point.
I couldn't really tell, of course, but I thought the isolation had done something to my posture. Also to my attention span; I wasn't exactly getting jumpy, at least not in the sense that every little hint of a noise scared me, but given how silent the whole place was, I started at every little hint of noise - some of them merely the echoes of my own footsteps - hoping that it was someone or even just something to change the routine. I was pretty sure I was slowly becoming a very obvious basketcase who would've been thrilled even with the company of those annoying student activists who had stopped me from going to class one day.
Part of it could've simply been the deep sense of insecurity and vulnerability that was invading my mind. The understanding that human minds were not meant to cope with this kind of isolation. That I was feeling deeply bored and also simultaneously panicked at the idea that I might have to live in this strange futuristic facility, forever, with no one for company but a space Roomba that kept fleeing from me. There was nothing to figure out here, nothing to deduce or to discover. It was just...more and more of these spotless, beautiful rooms that explained absolutely nothing. There were no systems for me to analyze, nothing for me to take apart, no story to be uncovered.
Things just...were.
It was great that the place was clean and that my basic material needs were being met. There was sadly no laundry room that I'd found yet - at least nothing I recognized as a laundry room - which meant I had been stuck in the same clothes for about two weeks or so, and I was not yet desperate enough to just go nude for the sake of hygiene and risk the off-chance that I'll eventually run into someone naked. It was tempting, though. Wearing my unwashed clothes felt dirty at this point. I'm pretty sure that the space Roomba wouldn't mind looking at my naked, malnourished body. I had actually thought of throwing my clothes at the Roomba in hopes that maybe it'd do my laundry or something. I didn't go through with it, though; for all I knew, it was just as likely that it would burn my clothes.
I was thinking about at least removing my jacket and unbuttoning the entire row of buttons on my blouse in "my bedroom" when the lights abruptly turned from white to flashing red and alarms began to blare at a distractingly loud volume to my oversensitive, unstimulated ears.
I froze. Actually, I cringed first, covering my ears, not panicking insomuch as having a complete deer-in-the-headlights moment as I tried - after fifteen-days-or-thereabouts of isolation - to act like a normal human being at something that resembled a fire alarm. Or air raid alarm. Or zombie alarm.
On the one hand, I was relieved there was something to break the utter tedium of the uneventful weeks spent with a space Roomba and literally nothing to do. On the other hand, fire alarms and just pop culture in general teaches most people that sudden red lights and klaxons were very bad things.
I was still in the midst of trying to figure out what was going on and what I was supposed to do when, lo and behold, the slit at the bottom of the metallic sliding doors admitted my old archnemesis, the space Roomba...which, for some reason, had a white flashing light blinking on top of its disc-like structure. When I approached, it started moving away again, through the slit in the door that promptly slid apart for me. But rather than fleeing like it usually did whenever I tried to chase it, it traveled at a noticeably slower speed, traveling almost exactly at my pace - which was not particularly fast, seeing how I was in the heels I had been wearing from work - and keeping an even distance from me even as it navigated the twists and turns of this facility, remaining in my line of sight at all times.
In a way, it reminded me about the jokes about blinking light on an airplane that led you to an exit in the case of an emergency. This was clearly the space Roomba's equivalent.
I followed, of course. Not just because I still had no idea why I was here or where I was or what was around the corner that could probably eat me very messily so as to trigger an alarm with scary red lights and scarier alarm sounds. There was, in fact, a weird kind of hope that this was an opportunity to follow the Roomba out of this clean and convenient but lonely and desolate. Maybe I'd just end up stuck in the middle of the Nevada desert, but at least I'll be back under the open sky. The irony that I had spent so many years struggling to keep a roof over my head was not lost on me.
The space Roomba continued to dart along ahead of me, taking me through a series of twists and turns through pristine halls and immaculate corridors, the white walls and golden highlights reflecting the red lights into my eyes. I swiftly lost track of how many times we've turned left and right; the space Roomba navigated the place with a daring I would not have imagined, at least not without leaving a breadcrumb trail behind me.
That the Roomba would clean up anyways, so maybe it is its fault to begin with. I haven't forgiven it.
The twists and turns continued, building an anxiety in me even as I felt my body practically vibrate with each and every blare of the alarm, my eyes straining to adjust to the flashing red lights that played hell with my vision. "How much further?" I asked the space Roomba with no real expectation that the question would be answered. Indeed, the glorified metallic saucer ahead of me simply went ever onward, flashing a white light for me to follow. At this point, I had long taken off my heels and was running barefoot across the metallic floor, if one didn't count my black stockings; I was at least thankful that the floor was almost perfectly flat and without a hint of cracks or bumps that would end with me rolling on the floor, clutching my toes and howling in pain. The space Roomba was good at setting me up for that, but I'd like to think it wasn't actively trying to mess with me this time.
I was getting tired. I had no idea how far I had run and wasn't exactly keeping track, but I felt like this was the closest I had ever come to running a marathon. My breath was coming up a little short, the minutes blurring against each other with every honk of the alarms and every flash of dreadful lights.
It was also beginning to occur to my sense of direction - my limited sense of direction, anyways - that I was not running in a straight line. That the space Roomba was leading me in weird directions. Which felt like it was screwing with me - it's already done so for the last two weeks or thereabouts, why would it stop there? - but there was part of me that wondered: What if it was trying to avoid something? Something dangerous? A bit more peripherally: How would I get back to "my" room?
I was just about to stop running so as to catch my breath and rest my burning legs when something happened. A sound, specifically, unintelligible, muffled behind closed metallic doors to my left. Sounds, actually, continuing to ring at a barely audible volume.
I blinked, straining to hear it against the blaring of the alarm, wishing it would be quiet. There was just something about that noise that made me pay attention, that made me think I needed to stop running and figure out what it was and why I was suddenly so interested in it. Instead of doing the smart thing, which was realizing that this was very possibly the thing the space Roomba was trying to lead me away from, and run away.
Annoyingly, the space Roomba had stopped about ten feet in front of me, turned around, and flashed its white light a little harder, as if realizing we needed to flee.
Then I remembered that the back of my brain categorized this sound as "unintelligible". And then the front of my brain suddenly realized that "unintelligible" meant something. It meant I couldn't understand what was being spoken. It meant something was being spoken. After a fortnight of what had amounted to "comfortable" solitary confinement, after having been isolated for so long, after struggling to find someone - anyone - in this facility to take to...
...There were people. On the other side of this door. Talking.
I ignored the increasingly urgent flashing of the light on the space Roomba's head, moving breathlessly instead for the metallic sliding double doors from which the voices were coming from. Three more steps. Two steps now. One more step and the doors would slide apart, admitting me to whatever was on the other side, and I would see people. I would see people who might very well mean me harm, but I didn't care at this point. This was stupid, and I would probably hate myself later for being so weepy and needy and stupid, but I needed to see someone right now.
I took the last step. The doors slid open.
I'm not sure what I was expecting on the other side, exactly. I mean, I expected people. That much was reasonable. But what I got instead as I was presented with another one of those ornate futuristic halls ahead of me was the sight of three people prone on the ground - all of them clothed in dark outfits that actually looked kind of like spacesuits - and a redhead girl, roughly my age in her early twenties, dressed darkly in something that looked like this weird mix of "modern soldier" and "medieval knight" - straps and pockets over tight leather clothing, linked with something that looked like armor plates here and there - who was suddenly charging at me with something that looked very much like a pistol in her hand.
When you grow up in a bad neighborhood, you learn to defend yourself, especially if you're a girl. Not necessarily in learning how to fight - although I had tried to do that - but just in how to protect yourself. Little things like shielding your head and kicking sensitive spots and running away. This being said, I'd only ever been in one actual fight with another girl, and it hadn't really been something I walked away victorious from. Not that I had lost either, strictly speaking, but whatever.
The point I'm trying to make here is that when the girl delivered a kick to my midsection, I wasn't really in any real position - any real training, any real expectation that I would be attacked so immediately - to defend myself from the painful blow that sent me tumbling equally painfully onto the ground. I barely caught my fall backwards in time, which was to say the back of my head slamming against the metallic floor beneath me didn't knock me out entirely, only "merely" momentarily reduced my thoughts to white noise and my vision to stars swimming through the night sky.
Somewhere in the back of my head, at least, alarms were screaming for me to get up, to repair those connections between my brain and the rest of my body. But my vision had only just cleared - even as I remained flat on my back - when I felt something cold and metallic - something that suddenly and terrifyingly felt like the barrel of a gun - press against the soft bottom of my jaw, and for a moment my vision was filled with the face of the redhead girl looking down at me with a surprisingly blank but ultimately scary expression.
"Sorry," she said dispassionately, her eyes cold as they locked into mine, and for no reason I could explain - even through the terror - I found it weird that I could understand her, even as her finger increased the pressure on the trigger to slam a slug right into my brain. "This isn't personal."
*****
あたしは異世界に移動された、獣耳の女の子を襲われた（性欲的に）
AKA
Intercessor
AKA
Kemonomimi Yuri Space Fantasy
あたしは異世界に移動された、獣耳の女の子を襲われた（性欲的に）
AKA
Intercessor
AKA
Kemonomimi Yuri Space Fantasy
Chapter 1: The Arkology (I)
In my defense, I hadn't actually been trying to get hit by a truck.
*****
The first hint that something was off was the smell. Or, more precisely, the lack of it.
It didn't immediately occur to me that I should've been anywhere else aside from the dubious comfort of my cheap mattress. Therefore, as I woke and stretched and moaned and did all the necessary things to rouse myself from among the sleeping dead, it wasn't quite until I opened my eyes that I realized something was off.
Because the ceiling I was looking up at was clearly not my own. It was white and too clean. It lacked a ceiling fine, serpentine cracks running across, that weird brownish-red stain in the corner I'd always been too afraid to touch even with cleaning gloves. And it definitely wasn't supposed to be comprised of smooth, spotless white metallic panels.
Then the realization set in, and I bolted up in my bed. Or, really, "my bed". Quotation marks because, first, it wasn't mine - a fact I discovered as I looked down and yelped and fell out of it like an idiot - and second, it didn't look like a bed. In fact, it looked more like the kind of pods space people in the future sleep in, where you're either floating in some kind of liquid or frozen. I'm not really a nerd, but I've seen enough sci-fi things simply through the sheer power of pop culture osmosis. And speaking of sci-fi...
The room I was in was brightly lit, about the size of a high school classroom, and was similarly comprised of those spotless, white, grooved metallic panels, save for what seemed like a futuristic-looking screen here or some kind of black super advanced machinery I couldn't identify there. All things I would've described better had I any idea what they even were, all the markings of a super far-flung future that belonged in a sci-fi film.
Which probably meant I had been abducted by a secret government cabal. And definitely meant I was suddenly very, very far from home.
I thus felt it was entirely appropriate for the next three words that came out of my mouth to be "what", "the", and something rather impolite, roughly in that order.
*****
I spent a while sitting frozen on my ass like a little pussy and gauging my surroundings before coming to the conclusion that there wasn't going to be a distorted voice on unseen speakers going "I want to play a game".
"Hello?" I called out as I walked down large, wide corridors, halls, and chambers, my voice - which I hoped sounded inquisitive rather than scared shitless- echoing off too-clean walls in the empty silence.
The good news, for better or for worse, was that I still had all my clothes: A cheap suit-blouse-skirt in slightly mismatched colors, picked up at a garage sale where a middle-aged woman had kindly offered me a pity discount until it became clear I intended to haggle down from even that. So no one had undressed me and put me in fetish wear yet. Not exactly a particularly optimistic outlook, but it's sort of amazing to see the twists and turns your brain makes when you want to look for any hint of comfort in an alien situation.
Speaking of aliens, I had probably been kidnapped by them. That was my revised assessment after I finally became half-convinced that the room I woke up in wasn't some kind of death trap, and that it was okay to get off my ass and explore. That, or I'd sleepwalked onto a truly humongous set for Hollywood's next multi-million dollar sci-fi blockbuster. Or, like I said in the beginning, I'd actually been kidnapped by the government and sent to a high-tech facility like Area 51 or something.
The first possibility was stupid, only slightly credible in the mind of a scared little shit like me. The second was a bit more probable until you realized that - seeing how everything here was actually made of metallic substances and glass instead of cardboard and green screens and CGI - this was well beyond the budget of even Hollywood. The third was most probable on its face, save for the fact that I was more likely to have been kidnapped by aliens looking for random test subjects than I was of government interest.
The architectural theme largely repeated itself as I walked further and further, surrounded by black metallic walls largely covered over by large white metallic panels that were so clean and pristine that they were almost semi-reflective. This minimalist design was sometimes complemented with gold-colored highlights that might've been wrought from real gold for all I knew, all well-illuminated by nothing in particular; there were no obvious major sources of light, nothing like a fixture or a lamp or even a spotlight, almost as if the architecture itself radiated luminescence. There were, of course, tinier sources of light, like the power indicator on devices that looked like computers but had no obvious interface or screen and did not respond to my attempts to press anything that looked like a power button. Not to mention glass panels, futuristic-looking furniture that resembled tables and chairs, barriers here that looked like railings and barriers there that looked like computer consoles embedded into the architecture, and little decorative details that seemed to suggest whoever designed this place didn't want it to look drab and soulless. Certainly, there was a simplistic elegance to it, the place looking less like an empty canvas and more like it was itself a work of art.
Not that it changed the fact that this place was huge and creepily deserted. "Hello?" I called out for what felt like the hundredth time for who knows how long. Hours, at least, but I didn't know how many; I didn't wear a watch, my phone was missing, and there were no clocks. Or perhaps there were no clocks I could recognize.
Nor was I keeping track of how many doors I had passed through at this point. Sure, the fact that there were sliding doors - terrifyingly thick metallic barriers that glided open soundlessly, the kind you'd think you'd find only in military bases or secret government labs researching the zombie virus - was, almost bizarrely, a source of relief: There was a familiarity about it that reminded me of supermarkets. But at this point, I was almost certain that I had passed through at least a hundred different rooms, hallways, corridors, chambers, and passageways in this unholy maze. Save for corridors that were nonetheless about as wide as two-lane streets, the rooms were all invariably large, or at least large by the standards of a poor person, ranging in size from "high school classroom" like the room I woke up in to "Las Vegas hotel lobby", not that I'd ever been in one. I had no good frame of reference, but given how long I had been walking and how much my feet was starting to ache, I was convinced that I long passed "baseball stadium" territory and was in danger of surpassing "Disneyland" on the scale of hugeness as well.
There were signs that people were supposed to have lived here once; I could, at least, recognize chairs, tables, desks, and similar pieces of furniture, sculpted in the same futuristic minimalist style as the rooms. And after what felt like hours of walking, I passed by at least two more rooms that resembled the one I woke up in, complete with those weird futuristic pods that looked like sci-fi beds. But no one was in them, nor were there any hints that anyone had been in them recently. And even at what felt like a hundredth-plus-one "hello", there was still no response but the echo of my own voice.
I started to tremble. It wasn't particularly cold - air conditioning, if there was such a thing here, must've be set to a comfortable temperature - but there was a very real fear given the...nothingness. Things could've been worse, but even though I didn't seem to be at risk of any particular harm, that I was here with no tools, no explanation, and no people was inherently terrifying.
Equally terrifying was the suddenly realization that I wasn't entirely sure - now that I had spent hours exploring - how to get back to the room I woke up in. There was no actual rational reason for me to go back, seeing how all of these rooms had a similar level of utility for me - that is to say none - but I must've been put in that specific room within that specific pod for a reason, right? If anyone was ever going to come along after having deposited me there - even if they were aliens who just wanted to stick an anal probe in me or something - surely that's where they'd come looking for me, right?
...Right?
*****
It was another few hours when I finally got back to "my" room, a little breathless from frayed nerves, the anxiety of the possibility of never being able to make it back having weighed rather heavily on my mind. I managed not to hyperventilate, something I would've felt more proud of had circumstances been different. For better or for worse, the room was exactly as I had remembered it, untouched and unchanged. Which was both relieving and depressing. Relieving in the sense of me going back to my room after spending the entire day worrying someone had broken into it, only to find out that there's no sign of such whatsoever, save for the fact that this wasn't my room. Depressing in the sense that, of course, I'm still alone.
I'd spent the last few years of my life being something of a loner, so it felt almost pathetic as to how starved for company I was at the moment. It hadn't even been an entire day.
At least, I thought it was an entire day. It's hard to tell, what with the whole "being stuck indoors with no windows or clocks".
It had just occurred to me that I was growing hungry when a slot at the bottom of the thick doors to "my" "bedroom" - I actually wasn't sure it was a bedroom - slid open, something that actually made me turn around in shock and alarm and anticipation; was someone finally here, someone I could talk to and get answers out of?
But in scooted in what I could only describe as a futuristic Roomba, sliding across the pristine floor. And on it was...a tray, actually. At least, it certainly resembled a cafeteria tray, albeit stocked with what seemed like blocks wrapped in a plastic wrapper, the kind of packaging you might've expected for a block of butter at a supermarket.
Tentatively, I picked up the tray, wanting to give its contents a closer look, trying to figure out if this was actually a tray of food...and then the Roomba-like device - I'm just going to call it a Roomba - suddenly slid away towards the open slot in the door. "Wait!" I called out, half-hoping - and half-dreading - that the Roomba was actually sentient.
No good. It ignored me completely and disappeared under the door before the slot slid shut. I rushed after it nonetheless, waiting for the doors to slide open as I reached it, but by the time they opened, the Roomba was long gone.
Scowling at my unsuccessful attempt to befriend a Roomba and at the fact that I had been attempting to befriend a Roomba, I returned to my bed and the discarded tray left there. The blocks of food were still there - at least I assumed it was food - still wrapped tightly like something on a supermarket shelf. I didn't plan on going hungry if I could help it - I had a longstanding grudge with hunger - but peeling open the wrapper was admittedly a half-hearted affair; the unwrapped block inside looked brown and nondescript, odorless and textureless. I couldn't help but think that what I held in my hand was what would happen if you threw a granola bar into a blender and tried to turn it back into a granola bar.
I also had no way of ascertaining whether or not what I held in my hand was poisonous - or if it would cause me diarrhea - but hunger sucked, so I took a tentative bite.
...It actually didn't taste too bad. A little salty, which I didn't quite expect. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, honestly. I couldn't really place the taste, and maybe hunger was playing a role here, but I wasn't instantly spitting the part I nibbled out of my mouth in disgust, so that nibble turned into a bite. And several bites and unwrapped plastic peels later, I had not died from poison.
So the food was safe to eat and - although entirely boring - was largely not utterly revolting. Hooray.
Speaking of diarrhea, I was pleased - at least as pleased as I could be under the circumstances - that there was a bathroom at the back of the room. That allowed me to wash up with warm water - coming in two varieties, clear and soaped - and relieve myself. Fortunately, unlike the pod-like bed, the weirdest thing I could say about the bathroom was how automated everything was. The faucet I expected, but warm water coming out of the shower the moment I stepped in was a surprise, although given there were no obvious knobs or buttons, I suppose I should've saw that coming.
So if this was some kind of super high-tech facility where confused inmates were subject to weird social or psychological experiments - like, if I was later expected to fight ninety-nine other people I didn't even know were in this facility to begin with, and to the death at that - then at least I got to spend my days in relative comfort, with weird but functional food, running water and toiletries, a clean "bedroom", and - of course - a bed. At least, if that's what you called the weird science fiction pod thing I was lying on. In. Whatever.
"Alright," I muttered to no one in particular, except possibly the ceiling above where I was lying down in the aforementioned "bed", "you're trapped in a giant base in the future. You have no idea where you are, you have no idea how to get out, and your only company is a space Roomba that feeds you.
"Got any bright ideas?"
*****
Roughly four days had passed, and I came to several conclusions.
I had, of course, absolutely no faith in my conclusions, nor in the assumption that four days had passed, but that's beside the point. Is that my first conclusion? I'll say that's my first conclusion.
The second was that unless this was some kind of experiment as to how much boredom a human being could tolerate, this place was probably well and truly abandoned, for one reason or another. Everything was still automated, which meant that while my hunger needs were being seen to by some kind of supercomputer - at least for now - it also meant until I could find a way out of this place, there was no one I could talk to. No weapons that I could find either, reducing the possibility that I was being set up to fight ninety-nine other abductees. Almost strangely, I wasn't sure how to feel about that.
I had hoped that by tugging on the thread that was the Roomba, I could at least figure out whether or not there was actually someone hidden away in another room, toying with me through the power of a remote control. I "ambushed" the Roomba bringing me my meal by clinging onto it, preventing it from fleeing without me...except the Roomba ended up having much more torque than I thought. As a result, I was pulled along the floor screaming in terror before the Roomba slid into a small slit under the wall. A small slit that I couldn't fit through, so - obviously - I slammed into the wall very ungracefully.
That actually caused me to roll on the floor for a full minute, writhing like I had stubbed my toe. I'll remember that, you little Roomba.
Third conclusion: Getting out of here was going to be a problem. I had already known that this place was mind-bogglingly huge. To test just how huge it actually was, on the third day, after the little Roomba handed me my meal - and after I had failed to catch it again - I tried to walk in as much of a straight line through a series of rooms as possible, leaving crumbs from my food where I made turns, almost like Hansel and Gretel, if Hansel and Gretel were stuck in a science fiction facility and were actually nineteen-years-old.
This method worked great, actually. I felt pretty good about myself as I started my return trip to my room, except that was when I realized that the bloody Roomba was cleaning up all the crumbs I had left behind.
So the space Roomba was actually a Roomba. I again attempted to chase it down - albeit this time in frustrated anger rather than desperate curiosity - only for it to flee and lead me to another abrupt kinetic visit into a wall while it slid into a slot at the bottom.
Clearly, the space Roomba was fast becoming my greatest enemy in this facility.
Finding the way back to "my" room afterwards was a difficult exercise, and the fact that I managed it actually made me feel pretty good about my own abilities at pathfinding. It did mean, however, that long excursions from my room were out of the question unless I developed a strong familiarity with my local surroundings...or unless I got creative with my pathfinding.
The space Roomba eventually came back with what I assumed was dinner. Previously, it had waited for me to take the tray from atop it before darting off; this time, it hit the brakes the moment it came through the slot underneath the giant double sliding doors. The tray of space food subsequently slipped off the space Roomba, slid across the floor, and came to a halt at my feet where I was seated on a chair. It then turned around and fled through the slit in the door before I could even get up and give chase.
I was becoming increasingly sure that the space Roomba was sentient and screwing with me.
*****
Back when I had still been in college, some student activists had come up to me and started talking about the prison system and how we needed to fight against solitary confinement, which was apparently a form of torture. Something that had always stuck out to me in that half-minute of our interaction was how human minds are just not meant to cope with isolation, with the absence of any human interaction, and that permanent psychological damage can be seen in as little as fifteen days.
Of course, at the time, I had told the girl - more politely, and in different words - that I was broke and already busting my ass trying to graduate, so please piss off.
Oh, incidentally, I had no way to tell aside from hoping that my sleep schedule in any way still resembled a twenty-four-hour clock, but I suspected it was just about fifteen days at that point.
I couldn't really tell, of course, but I thought the isolation had done something to my posture. Also to my attention span; I wasn't exactly getting jumpy, at least not in the sense that every little hint of a noise scared me, but given how silent the whole place was, I started at every little hint of noise - some of them merely the echoes of my own footsteps - hoping that it was someone or even just something to change the routine. I was pretty sure I was slowly becoming a very obvious basketcase who would've been thrilled even with the company of those annoying student activists who had stopped me from going to class one day.
Part of it could've simply been the deep sense of insecurity and vulnerability that was invading my mind. The understanding that human minds were not meant to cope with this kind of isolation. That I was feeling deeply bored and also simultaneously panicked at the idea that I might have to live in this strange futuristic facility, forever, with no one for company but a space Roomba that kept fleeing from me. There was nothing to figure out here, nothing to deduce or to discover. It was just...more and more of these spotless, beautiful rooms that explained absolutely nothing. There were no systems for me to analyze, nothing for me to take apart, no story to be uncovered.
Things just...were.
It was great that the place was clean and that my basic material needs were being met. There was sadly no laundry room that I'd found yet - at least nothing I recognized as a laundry room - which meant I had been stuck in the same clothes for about two weeks or so, and I was not yet desperate enough to just go nude for the sake of hygiene and risk the off-chance that I'll eventually run into someone naked. It was tempting, though. Wearing my unwashed clothes felt dirty at this point. I'm pretty sure that the space Roomba wouldn't mind looking at my naked, malnourished body. I had actually thought of throwing my clothes at the Roomba in hopes that maybe it'd do my laundry or something. I didn't go through with it, though; for all I knew, it was just as likely that it would burn my clothes.
I was thinking about at least removing my jacket and unbuttoning the entire row of buttons on my blouse in "my bedroom" when the lights abruptly turned from white to flashing red and alarms began to blare at a distractingly loud volume to my oversensitive, unstimulated ears.
I froze. Actually, I cringed first, covering my ears, not panicking insomuch as having a complete deer-in-the-headlights moment as I tried - after fifteen-days-or-thereabouts of isolation - to act like a normal human being at something that resembled a fire alarm. Or air raid alarm. Or zombie alarm.
On the one hand, I was relieved there was something to break the utter tedium of the uneventful weeks spent with a space Roomba and literally nothing to do. On the other hand, fire alarms and just pop culture in general teaches most people that sudden red lights and klaxons were very bad things.
I was still in the midst of trying to figure out what was going on and what I was supposed to do when, lo and behold, the slit at the bottom of the metallic sliding doors admitted my old archnemesis, the space Roomba...which, for some reason, had a white flashing light blinking on top of its disc-like structure. When I approached, it started moving away again, through the slit in the door that promptly slid apart for me. But rather than fleeing like it usually did whenever I tried to chase it, it traveled at a noticeably slower speed, traveling almost exactly at my pace - which was not particularly fast, seeing how I was in the heels I had been wearing from work - and keeping an even distance from me even as it navigated the twists and turns of this facility, remaining in my line of sight at all times.
In a way, it reminded me about the jokes about blinking light on an airplane that led you to an exit in the case of an emergency. This was clearly the space Roomba's equivalent.
I followed, of course. Not just because I still had no idea why I was here or where I was or what was around the corner that could probably eat me very messily so as to trigger an alarm with scary red lights and scarier alarm sounds. There was, in fact, a weird kind of hope that this was an opportunity to follow the Roomba out of this clean and convenient but lonely and desolate. Maybe I'd just end up stuck in the middle of the Nevada desert, but at least I'll be back under the open sky. The irony that I had spent so many years struggling to keep a roof over my head was not lost on me.
The space Roomba continued to dart along ahead of me, taking me through a series of twists and turns through pristine halls and immaculate corridors, the white walls and golden highlights reflecting the red lights into my eyes. I swiftly lost track of how many times we've turned left and right; the space Roomba navigated the place with a daring I would not have imagined, at least not without leaving a breadcrumb trail behind me.
That the Roomba would clean up anyways, so maybe it is its fault to begin with. I haven't forgiven it.
The twists and turns continued, building an anxiety in me even as I felt my body practically vibrate with each and every blare of the alarm, my eyes straining to adjust to the flashing red lights that played hell with my vision. "How much further?" I asked the space Roomba with no real expectation that the question would be answered. Indeed, the glorified metallic saucer ahead of me simply went ever onward, flashing a white light for me to follow. At this point, I had long taken off my heels and was running barefoot across the metallic floor, if one didn't count my black stockings; I was at least thankful that the floor was almost perfectly flat and without a hint of cracks or bumps that would end with me rolling on the floor, clutching my toes and howling in pain. The space Roomba was good at setting me up for that, but I'd like to think it wasn't actively trying to mess with me this time.
I was getting tired. I had no idea how far I had run and wasn't exactly keeping track, but I felt like this was the closest I had ever come to running a marathon. My breath was coming up a little short, the minutes blurring against each other with every honk of the alarms and every flash of dreadful lights.
It was also beginning to occur to my sense of direction - my limited sense of direction, anyways - that I was not running in a straight line. That the space Roomba was leading me in weird directions. Which felt like it was screwing with me - it's already done so for the last two weeks or thereabouts, why would it stop there? - but there was part of me that wondered: What if it was trying to avoid something? Something dangerous? A bit more peripherally: How would I get back to "my" room?
I was just about to stop running so as to catch my breath and rest my burning legs when something happened. A sound, specifically, unintelligible, muffled behind closed metallic doors to my left. Sounds, actually, continuing to ring at a barely audible volume.
I blinked, straining to hear it against the blaring of the alarm, wishing it would be quiet. There was just something about that noise that made me pay attention, that made me think I needed to stop running and figure out what it was and why I was suddenly so interested in it. Instead of doing the smart thing, which was realizing that this was very possibly the thing the space Roomba was trying to lead me away from, and run away.
Annoyingly, the space Roomba had stopped about ten feet in front of me, turned around, and flashed its white light a little harder, as if realizing we needed to flee.
Then I remembered that the back of my brain categorized this sound as "unintelligible". And then the front of my brain suddenly realized that "unintelligible" meant something. It meant I couldn't understand what was being spoken. It meant something was being spoken. After a fortnight of what had amounted to "comfortable" solitary confinement, after having been isolated for so long, after struggling to find someone - anyone - in this facility to take to...
...There were people. On the other side of this door. Talking.
I ignored the increasingly urgent flashing of the light on the space Roomba's head, moving breathlessly instead for the metallic sliding double doors from which the voices were coming from. Three more steps. Two steps now. One more step and the doors would slide apart, admitting me to whatever was on the other side, and I would see people. I would see people who might very well mean me harm, but I didn't care at this point. This was stupid, and I would probably hate myself later for being so weepy and needy and stupid, but I needed to see someone right now.
I took the last step. The doors slid open.
I'm not sure what I was expecting on the other side, exactly. I mean, I expected people. That much was reasonable. But what I got instead as I was presented with another one of those ornate futuristic halls ahead of me was the sight of three people prone on the ground - all of them clothed in dark outfits that actually looked kind of like spacesuits - and a redhead girl, roughly my age in her early twenties, dressed darkly in something that looked like this weird mix of "modern soldier" and "medieval knight" - straps and pockets over tight leather clothing, linked with something that looked like armor plates here and there - who was suddenly charging at me with something that looked very much like a pistol in her hand.
When you grow up in a bad neighborhood, you learn to defend yourself, especially if you're a girl. Not necessarily in learning how to fight - although I had tried to do that - but just in how to protect yourself. Little things like shielding your head and kicking sensitive spots and running away. This being said, I'd only ever been in one actual fight with another girl, and it hadn't really been something I walked away victorious from. Not that I had lost either, strictly speaking, but whatever.
The point I'm trying to make here is that when the girl delivered a kick to my midsection, I wasn't really in any real position - any real training, any real expectation that I would be attacked so immediately - to defend myself from the painful blow that sent me tumbling equally painfully onto the ground. I barely caught my fall backwards in time, which was to say the back of my head slamming against the metallic floor beneath me didn't knock me out entirely, only "merely" momentarily reduced my thoughts to white noise and my vision to stars swimming through the night sky.
Somewhere in the back of my head, at least, alarms were screaming for me to get up, to repair those connections between my brain and the rest of my body. But my vision had only just cleared - even as I remained flat on my back - when I felt something cold and metallic - something that suddenly and terrifyingly felt like the barrel of a gun - press against the soft bottom of my jaw, and for a moment my vision was filled with the face of the redhead girl looking down at me with a surprisingly blank but ultimately scary expression.
"Sorry," she said dispassionately, her eyes cold as they locked into mine, and for no reason I could explain - even through the terror - I found it weird that I could understand her, even as her finger increased the pressure on the trigger to slam a slug right into my brain. "This isn't personal."
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
Well!
I have no clue what the heck happened, but can't wait for the next installment!
I have no clue what the heck happened, but can't wait for the next installment!
- Location
- Not the asylum anymore
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Okay, this interesting, and just a little creepy.
Watched with the force of a thousand exploding suns!
Watched with the force of a thousand exploding suns!
Should have trusted the evil Roomba, obviously!
- Location
- PA
*thoughts so far*
Those people that redhead clobbered did not do their prisoner any favors by not explaining jack crap to her but I'm guessing Redhead's faction will explain what's what and why she needed to get shot through the jaw.
That or prisoner lady's there for expositional reasons but I kind of doubt it. Then again she certainly comes off as faceless enough for that...
Those people that redhead clobbered did not do their prisoner any favors by not explaining jack crap to her but I'm guessing Redhead's faction will explain what's what and why she needed to get shot through the jaw.
That or prisoner lady's there for expositional reasons but I kind of doubt it. Then again she certainly comes off as faceless enough for that...
- Location
- Not the asylum anymore
- Pronouns
- She/Her
We can't be sure of anything when it comes to the knocked out guys (I'mma call them"The Three Caballeros"). We don't know know who they are, how they came to lie on the floor unconscious (probably), their affiliations with redhead or space Roomba...
Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
Space Roomba trusted you and you let him down.
Tayta Malikai
200% Space Whale
- Location
- Australia
I'm stillll, in a dreeeaaam, Space Roooombaaaa...
Heh, well, you already know what I think about this. It was cool! The pacing was a ton better and the prose strung me along for the whole ride. And I sympathized far too much with the graduate hobo protagonist /o\
Heh, well, you already know what I think about this. It was cool! The pacing was a ton better and the prose strung me along for the whole ride. And I sympathized far too much with the graduate hobo protagonist /o\
Mother Nyx
Mother of Elpis
- Location
- The Kei Klub
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Put your seat belts on folks, we're in for a ride!
- Location
- America
Maybe the space romba will pull a rescue. Not sure what going on but it seems intresting, I like the narration.
Whiskey Golf
Being of Editing & Technical Assistance
- Location
- Chained to my desk
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
At first you had my curiousity
but now you also have my attention.
Also, what does this translate to? I asked Google but I'm reasonably sure it's not accurate.
- Location
- america
Dunno. I'll look it up in the dictionary!
あたしは異世界に移動された、獣耳の女の子を襲われた（性欲的に）
あたしは - atashi is just a way girls refer to themselves, like watashi. the last character is the wa particle, which sets the broad topic, so this sentence is about herself. She might be the speaker, even. it means I or myself.
異世界に - isekai, the last character is the ni particle, based on the rest of the sentence i'd say this is where the sentence takes place.
移動された - a form of移動する, I think. Sareta might be the causative verb form of suru. Sorry, I just never see these so im not sure
獣耳の女の子を - I guess 獣耳 creates a noun meaning beast's ear. then you get 女の子 basically saying young woman. With the no particle in between connecting the two nouns. So.. Beasts ear of young woman, or maybe the other way around, young woman with a beasts ear - finally the o particle [を] here is referring to this thing we just described which ties into the verb following:
襲われた - I think this is the causative past verb form of 襲う, which means to attack. 襲われた means was attacked. Sidenote: causative verbs are, let me steal this:
I in another world a girl with beast ears attacked me (something like sex, but not sex. dunno)
I went to another world and a girl with beast ears attacked me! (still dunno)
Let's see what google translate says!
1. I was attacked by a girl with a beast ear who was moved to another world (sexually)
2. I was moved to a different world, was attacked by the girl of the beast ear (in libido basis)
あたしは - atashi is just a way girls refer to themselves, like watashi. the last character is the wa particle, which sets the broad topic, so this sentence is about herself. She might be the speaker, even. it means I or myself.
異世界に - isekai, the last character is the ni particle, based on the rest of the sentence i'd say this is where the sentence takes place.
移動された - a form of移動する, I think. Sareta might be the causative verb form of suru. Sorry, I just never see these so im not sure
獣耳の女の子を - I guess 獣耳 creates a noun meaning beast's ear. then you get 女の子 basically saying young woman. With the no particle in between connecting the two nouns. So.. Beasts ear of young woman, or maybe the other way around, young woman with a beasts ear - finally the o particle [を] here is referring to this thing we just described which ties into the verb following:
襲われた - I think this is the causative past verb form of 襲う, which means to attack. 襲われた means was attacked. Sidenote: causative verbs are, let me steal this:
性欲的に - jisho says 性欲 is sexual desire, 的 might be target, or -like. so, like sexual desire? don't know.
I in another world a girl with beast ears attacked me (something like sex, but not sex. dunno)
I went to another world and a girl with beast ears attacked me! (still dunno)
Let's see what google translate says!
1. I was attacked by a girl with a beast ear who was moved to another world (sexually)
2. I was moved to a different world, was attacked by the girl of the beast ear (in libido basis)
Requesting someone who can actually read japanese pleaseeeeeeeeeee
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@Suzu translated the Japanese to "The Harmonious Unification Through Animal Appendages", which is certainly one way to interpret the title. Also...
I similarly have no objections with this translation. =3
Intercessor is now up at Royal Road, after confirming with their staff that I am, indeed, the author~
I similarly have no objections with this translation. =3
Intercessor is now up at Royal Road, after confirming with their staff that I am, indeed, the author~
- Location
- secret base
- Pronouns
- She/Her
This is my Reiwalution.
- Location
- 委員長の牢獄
Putting in effort should be rewarded! So here I come with some Japanese grammar information!
You're basically spot on until 移動された, although I would note that in this case the に particle is pointing out the "target" of the verb rather than being where the events are taking place - it's a minor difference but it's the nuance between "I was transported in the otherworld" and "I was transported to the otherworld".
された is correctly a conjugation of する, but specifically it is the passive form, you can tell in this case by the fact that the passive makes more sense. "I made [something?] be transported to the otherworld" is weird because there's no sign of what it is happening to with the causative form. Meanwhile the passive has the meaning of "the verb happens to the subject".
Also, if you keep up learning Japanese, you're gonna start seeing する a lot lol
You attach it to literally anything and everything to generate all kinds of verb meanings.
獣耳の女の子 is as you surmise "beast-ear girl" - although since Japanese nouns don't have singular/plural difference it could also be "girls". The を is an agent-marker - that is, in a passive construction, the marker of who is doing the thing to the subject. 襲われた is about correct, although it is, again, specifically the passive construction. So the subject is assailed by the beast-ear girl(s). The subject, of course, is the same あたし as in the previous sentence given topic dropping.
性欲的に is basically... "sexually". It's not obviously bound to any part of the sentence but it intuitively binds to the last verb, so "assailed (sexually)" is a pretty straightforward reading.
Putting it all together is left as an exercise for the reader
(source: I've passed the N2)
Chapter 2: The Arkology (II)
Chapter 2: The Arkology (II)
I could feel the pressure from the barrel of the handgun against the soft, fleshy part of my jaw, feeling weirdly cold instead of searing hot like I otherwise would've expected. My fight-or-flight instincts seemed to be busy elsewhere as I opted instead for freezing up, wide-eyed like a little pussy. As the redhead stared at me with that cold, impassive look, I was waiting for that flash underneath my chain that would launch a bullet into my head and blow my brains into tomato juice, ready to put an end to my story.
Except there was a sudden crackle - the kind you'd associate with electricity - and suddenly the redhead was yelping and falling off of me to my right, just enough for me to suddenly reestablish my brain's connections to the rest of my body and roll away to the left in something that resembled blind panic.
As I did so, I realized that I rolled and bumped into something hard but not particularly tall. And when I finally scrambled back onto my knees, I realized what I had hit was, in fact, the little space Roomba with an appendage sticking out from its shell, looking like a robotic arm at a factory, except the very end was sparkling with electricity.
So it had shocked the redhead girl off me. That was nice. We're not even yet, but the space Roomba is steadily working off the emotional debt for all the grief it had caused me. And physical debt too, but that wasn't as important right now.
Still, I found myself locking glares with the redhead in front of me, who had similarly tumbled across the floor but had achieved a three-point landing, with her remaining hand holding the gun that was pointed at me. Or not at me, but the space Roomba, which happened to be in roughly the same direction anyways. There wasn't really anger in her eyes, just a kind of emptiness that people might've associated with the mugshot of a serial killer or a school shooter, focusing on me like I was some kind of pest to be eliminated. So I did the natural thing people do when faced with a complete stranger with a gun.
That is to say, I begged for my life.
Well, no, not really begged for my life. I wasn't that miserable. I just...asked a question as I waved my hands in front of me. Desperately. Specifically: "Wait, wait, why are you trying to kill me!?"
The redhead blinked in confusion, and when she blinked a second time, it seemed as if some kind of realization suddenly overcame her, and just like that, her eyes were no longer cold and clouded and empty, but danced with the kind of life that I saw in (and had been jealous of) frat boys and sorority girls when they were partying. Like someone who was human, with emotions.
"I didn't see you on the ship," she observed, her voice still bland but not quite as cold as before. I realized for the first time - despite this being the second time I heard her speak, but she had a gun under my chin then and that's my justification - that she had an accent I couldn't quite place. It definitely wasn't American, at least. European, perhaps? She did have pale skin. For however much that mattered. Not that I could recognize European accents.
Of course, that didn't really help explain anything at all, so I asked the obvious after a moment of complete blankness: "What ship?"
Again, the redhead blinked, tilting her head slightly to the side this time in clear confusion. "Are you trying to kill me?" she asked.
"What?" It was my turn to blink. "No! I'm not trying to kill you." I blinked again before realizing that maybe this statement of hers was something to panic over. "Wait, are people trying to kill you?" I looked over the redhead's shoulder and past the open doors where she had come from, taking note of the fact that there are three people still on the ground where I last saw them, except they weren't moving and what was unmistakably blood was beginning to pool on the floor. "Wait, did you kill them?"
The redhead, however, didn't seem super interested in answer my question right now as she looked at the space Roomba between us, still poised to strike with that robotic arm sparkling with electricity, almost resembling a scorpion in a weird way. The look of confusion turned into something deeper. Astonishment, perhaps, not quite believing what she was seeing in front of her. "Is that servitor protecting you?"
"You mean this Roomba?"
"No, that's a servi..." the redhead trailed off, frowned, then asked me, "...what's a 'Roomba'?"
So she came from a place that didn't have Roombas, I guessed. Which made me wonder if Europe had Roombas, but I suppose that really didn't matter all that much in the end. "Never mind. It was...trying to lead me somewhere."
The redhead's expression looked skeptical at this instead of just confused, but she nodded slowly, as if accepting this...for now, for the lack of a better alternative explanation. "Right," she nodded; there was a lilt to her voice that wasn't there before, something that seemed to give me the impression that she was, in general, a fairly cheery person. Also that she didn't really believe me right at the moment. "Were you a stowaway?"
Well, the redhead was talking about a ship earlier. Not that I knew anything about that. "I don't know?" I admittedly lamely. "I'm...not from here. I just woke up here a few weeks ago."
That skepticism on the redhead's face looked much more pronounced now, but she nodded again like someone that was eager to get to something else that was more important. "Right. Well, do you want out?"
Oh, boy, do I ever. "Yes!"
"Then you'd better follow me," the redhead announced, sliding something into her handgun in a way that kind of reminded me of movies where soldiers would reload. And in a way, the redhead - in terms of attire and demeanor - reminded me of a soldier. Or maybe a soldier of fortune, a mercenary, one of those combatants from private military companies that I used to hear on the news and see in movies as villains.
Not that I had any real idea of what she was, exactly, save for the fact that I saw her first when she was surrounded by three dead bodies now bleeding on the ground. "Um," I started, raising a hand awkwardly to shoulder-level, reminded of this little detail about the three dead bodies past the open door and suddenly not feeling all that hot about walking beside someone with a gun. "So...why did you kill them?"
The redhead was already beginning to move back in the direction of the room she came from, marching up to the bodies before picking up one of the guns on the ground. "Because they were trying to kill me."
...Yeah, it was a bit hard to argue with that, I supposed. Not that I knew whether or not she was telling the truth, but the fact that there were guns beside the dead bodies seemed to support that claim. Either way, the redhead slung the gun she picked up by the strap around her shoulder - some kind of rifle or submachine gun, I didn't know, not actually being any kind of gun person - and began moving on once again.
Not knowing what else to do, I followed sheepishly behind, not even having the presence of mind to pick up one of the other two guns on the floor. Not that I even knew how to use them anyways, and they likely would've been greater harm to myself than anyone else, but that's really just an excuse to say I wasn't in a frame of mind where I knew what the hell I was doing. And, behind me, the space Roomba followed, albeit flashing its light ever harder - I was surprised that was even possible - as if nagging at me to follow it instead of this mysterious and probably dangerous redhead with a gun who had killed three people and just tried to kill me.
Well, "tried" is past tense, after all. And she had stopped when she realized I hadn't been trying to kill her. That's...nice, I suppose? That I wasn't in immediate danger? Maybe that made her a considerate person? This place was doing something bad to my basic standard.
"We need to get back onto the Fortune's Wings," the redhead announced as she moved past another set of sliding doors, unphased by the fact that a complete stranger was following her; if anything else, she was giving the space Roomba following us a much more wary glance. And there was just something about the way she said "fortune's wings" that made me think the words needed to be capitalized. Like a name or something. "If we can't sneak back on, we're stuck here forever."
"Oh," I mouthed blankly. That was probably a bad thing. I mean, I had company now, but two weeks were enough to drive me near-crazy. I wanted off.
The redhead definitely knew the place better than I did, navigating its twists and turns deftly, moving through each door cautiously, as if expecting a threat behind every one. I wasn't sure if that meant she was an inhabitant here or if she just had a much better sense of direction than someone who needed Google Maps on her phone.
The silence was awkward. Here was finally someone who was willing to talk to me - even if she had two guns now - and we were just walking around in silence. Struggling to find something to talk about, I reached back into my memory for something that seemed at least relevant to our situation, asking, "So...is that a ship? Um, what you said, I mean. Fortune's Wings or something?"
"Yes," the redhead replied, moving towards the next set of doors, but approaching it from the side. The angle reminded me of how kids would try to get close to the automatic sliding doors of a supermarket without triggering the sensors that opened them.
"So...are we on an island?"
"No," the redhead answered, pressing herself against the walls of sliding doors that were still close, her gun - the longer one, not her handgun - now gripped in both hands, "we're on an arkology."
I copied her movements and pressed myself against the wall behind her. "What's an arkology?"
"Can I answer those questions later?" For what it was worth, the redhead did not actually sound impatient or frustrated; there was, in fact, a level of something that sounded suspiciously like earnestness in her rather matter-of-fact statement as she pointed calmly towards the doors. "The hangar is beyond these doors and I want to try to get in it before they set up any mounted guns."
"Oh, okay, sorry." I said that politely and with an appropriate amount of contriteness despite the back of my head telling me there was something wrong with her statement. Which I thought was nice because people usually complained I was too sharp and sarcastic and insincere. Which of course had nothing to do with the fact that the redhead in question had a gun in her hands, and was strangely generous enough to help me get out despite her being stuck in a situation that I didn't fully comprehend but which apparently necessitated a gun.
The redhead nodded, taking a breath as if to steel herself. "Ready?" she asked. The question was rhetorical; she was already moving towards the front of the doors, the two metallic panels sliding open soundlessly, and I was already beginning to take that first step, shifting my momentum forwards.
Myr foot had not yet even landed on the floor to complete that step when I realized exactly why I was having an uncomfortable thought at the back of my head. And now that my consciousness finally registered it, "uncomfortable" turned to "alarm". "Wait," I said blankly, "you said 'mounted gun'?"
My answer came as I found myself looking through the open door and towards what laid beyond it. It was the largest room I had come across in this facility thus far - no, easily the largest room I had ever seen, ever, looking like it was the size of a dozen football stadiums, if not more - stretching to the reaches of my vision. It formed a bit of an arc, and so I couldn't see the "end" of it before it turned away beyond my line of sight, as if I was moving out of a giant circular stadium, but even then it felt like I could stare down its end for miles. On the far side of this giant room hundreds of yards away, opposite of the door I was already stepping through, should've been a wall, except there wasn't. In fact, I found myself looking at what looked like a blue glowing window - the kind you'd maybe see at a rave club as decoration - and on the other side of it was...
...The starry night sky.
It's unmistakable: Clusters of stars against the black sky. Faint clouds of light that are supposed to be nebulae. A path away from the suffocation of an endless stretch of silent halls and lonely chambers. Freedom.
I might've appreciated the moment more, the realization that I was suddenly this close to getting out of there. I'm not a particularly emotional person, but it felt like an emotional moment.
Sadly, I had other things to worry about. Like the fact that the redhead beside me wasn't charging forward, and was in fact staying behind one of the two sliding doors. The fact that in front of me this time wasn't the smooth metallic floor that stretched on to the walls, but relatively narrower walkways - wide enough for at least two vans to easily pass each other side-by-side - that reminded me of a pier or factory walkway, suspended over what I assumed to be the sea or at least a distant floor, making me think I was actually stuck in a secret supervillain base under a mountain island or something. The fact that there was something at the end of one of these walkways a hundred yards in front of me: A strange-looking ship-like vessel about the size of a very large luxury yacht - the kind some rich asshole would throw big parties on - with an aged, brown hull that looked like it had spent years in Afghanistan, something that seemed so weirdly out of place in this pristinely white-and-gold facility. The fact that there were people in front of that ship - women, in fact, a bit more than half a dozen of them, clad in that hodgepodge of what Hollywood has convinced me is special forces attire, hardly dissimilar to those of the redhead I've been following - who were now pointing at me and the redhead and shouting something in a tone that made it clear they weren't trying to be friends. The fact that they were holding things in their hands that very suspiciously looked like guns that were now being raised and pointed in our direction.
Oh, and there was the fact that amongst them, there was something fixed onto a tripod. I've never fired a gun, nor was I a nerd, but that "something" looked very, very much like a machine gun. Something I sadly did not fully register until I had stepped past the doors and walls that would serve as a shield between me and any bullets fired in my direction.
I did the smart thing. I tripped and stumbled and scampered back to the door like the frightened little rat I was, making incoherent yelping noises, waiting for that inevitable moment when the machine gun would start spewing hot lead at us. The redhead, meanwhile, stood her ground, leaning out just slightly from the door, enough for her to admit her handgun, firing at the women fifty yards away in a stance that struck me as terrifyingly professional, the kind that one would imagine belonged to some kind of superspy or something. One of those quick shots actually managed to hit someone with a bullet that trailed blue as it tore through the air, the victim of her shot screaming as she slumped to the floor.
Then the machine gun started firing, and that's when I realized it wasn't a machine gun.
I was fifty yards away, around the corner of the door, and not even within the line of sight, and yet what the redhead had called a "mounted gun" fired in my general vicinity. What struck me as surprising at first - insomuch as I could be surprised in the middle of my panties-wetting terror - was the sound of the mounted gun rather than the sight of gunfire streaming through the open door I was hiding beside. It was clearly not the ear-shattering mini-explosions of firecrackers that Chinatown let off during Chinese New Year, if those firecrackers were actually on steroids. Rather, it sounded like a combination of a high-pitched mechanical whine and electricity, a combination of crackling and rumbling that a giant Tesla coil would make. Tragically, it was no easier on the ear, abruptly swallowing me into a world of an unholy cacophony, blasting my eardrums and my head with what my brain was deathly certain was all the explosions in the world, despite the fact that the gun wasn't even firing at me, but through the door of which I was beside, a detail that I was slower to notice in part because I was cowering behind the wall and curling into a ball and covering my ears and closing my eyes and screaming like a little girl.
When I did open my eyes a moment later, I noticed a second detail. The gunfire in our direction? The bullets that were striking the walls we' were hiding behind and through the door we tried to pass through? They weren't bullets. Rather, what streamed through the door was bright, thick, jagged line of light that looked like an unstable bolt of electricity, crackling violently as it twisted this way and that every few milliseconds. Despite lashing out like a whip, it didn't bend and twist enough to strike me from around the automatic doors, nor did it automatically swerve to strike the nearest soft and flesh target. Nor, in fact, did it simply melt the thick, pristine wall I was hiding behind, which seemed to suffer nary a scratch as it violently lashed this way and that in an attempt to kill the redhead and myself. But the twisting, crackling beam was enough to make me roll away in terror, not only because that lightning bolt was uncomfortably close to zapping me into charred jerky, but because, for all intents and purposes, the women I saw on the other side of this door had what was basically a literal lightning gun.
Hi, I have been kidnapped by secret elements of the government to a classified science fiction facility where military special forces test experimental weapons, including weapons from the future like a literal lightning gun that is spewing a steady stream of electricity or something at us. Please send help.
Amidst all of this, the redhead had similarly ducked back from where she was peeking out around the doorframe, reloading her handgun with the kind of calmness that one doesn't generally associate with "being shot at with a mounted gun". That coldness in her eyes - that deathliness in her gaze the first time we had locked stares as she shoved a gun under my chin - had returned, and I was even more certain that I had, proverbially speaking, picked the wrong horse, that this girl was crazy, and that I was going to die one way or another because of it.
"Holy shit!" I screamed in her direction, my voice shrill and lilting with clear panic. I must've looked like a massive sissy. I didn't find it in me to blame myself; I've witnessed gang violence before in the bad neighborhoods I had lived in, but never had I ever actually been shot at before, because I always maintained my distance; you learn to be sensitive about these things when you live in shitty places. Now my virgin shootout experience involved a literal lightning gun, and it was like the cherry on top of an already terrifying few weeks. "What the hell is that!?"
Despite having to raise her voice over the sound of the gunfire, the redhead sounded infuriatingly calm - making me look bad by extension - as she shouted back, "Plasma array!"
I would like to note, then, that tech from the future is officially here, and I am being murdered by it. More importantly: "Why are they shooting at you!?"
"On-site negotiations really didn't work out well!"
"What the hell in those negotiations did you do to piss them off that badly!?" I screamed. It occurred to me once again that I was stuck with a killer - a complete stranger in who had already killed, someone good at it, to my entirely uninformed observations - and that staying with her in the middle of this conflict I knew absolutely nothing about was increasingly looking like the result of an awful decision-making process. Except alternative choices - the totally nice-looking people fifty yards whose motivations are also entirely unknown to me - were currently being violently postponed by a combination of rifles and a mounted gun that was shooting not lightning, but plasma.
It didn't matter that maybe these people who were firing that plasma array maybe had perfectly legitimate reasons to try and kill this redhead, whom, for all I knew, might've been a terrorist or a serial killer or chewed with her mouth open. Under the circumstances, the redhead - the killer who nearly fired a bullet into my brain from under my jaw - suddenly seemed like an entirely reasonable person to stick with. It's funny how much fired and unfired bullets change one's perspective on how to justify horrible, horrible things.
For just a moment, the "plasma array" stopped firing - a moment in which my world isn't full of electric screeching and that crackling beam disappears - and the redhead leaned out from around the doorframe to fire several shots again. But this incurred a response of what is clearly gunfire - sounding more like actual guns this time, at least the guns that had been involved whenever there had been a shooting in the neighborhood - forcing the redhead to hide back behind the doorframe once more, followed by the return of the plasma array firing through the door in hopes of hitting anything, or at least deterring any counterattack.
This exchange of gunfire lasted for a few more moments before the redhead grimaced, pulling back behind the door and announcing to me, "This isn't working." And before I could fully process this statement, she stepped away from the door, allowing it to automatically close, and grabbed me by the wrist, shouting, " Let's go!"
And for a long, fleeting, surreal moment - where the world seemed to pass me by without me ever really taking full account of it - I was dragged through a dizzying chain of corridors and doors. We could've been going back the way whence we came, or we could've been going through an entirely new path. I didn't know, as much of a daze I was in. I'm sorry if you expected me to already be some kind of stone-cold killer, but I was only a bit more than two weeks into my kidnapping, and for the low, low price of having being shot at with experimental prototype military weapons from space, I was already missing my dingy apartment, my moldy mattress, my dead-end job, my sexist and racist colleagues, and my half-senile mother who was somehow not yet senile enough to ask why I wasn't making grandchildren for her.
Seconds passed. Maybe minutes. It was hard to tell, in my current state of mind. All I knew was that eventually, the redhead stopped and let go of my wrist. She looked back towards the door we stepped through, seemed to think about things, then declared a moment afterwards: "They shouldn't be able to find us. Their only other tracker is kind of a hack."
Ah. She was a tracker. I realized that I didn't understand what that meant and - right at that particular moment - didn't care. I collapsed onto the floor, sprawling across its cold metal surface, wheezing my lungs out, looking blankly upwards. I didn't care whether or not the floor was dirty or bad for my back. I was small, thin, malnourished, and horribly out-of-shape. This was the hardest I had ever ran in my life, my body starting to tremble as I started to come down from my adrenaline high, leaving me with only this cold, numb feeling - realization, really - of "holy shit, holy shit, I probably almost died five different times in the last fifteen minutes". If I had more energy, I would've curled up into a ball and stayed there for the next hour or something.
Beside me, too close for me to ignore it but far enough that I couldn't reach out and smack it, the space Roomba - or "servitor", whatever - continued to intensely flash its blinking light in my face.
This was a fact that did not escape the redhead's notice. "The servitor is still following you," she remarked, continuing to stare at the space Roomba with an expression of muted confusion and astonishment.
"Is that what you call the Roomba?" I asked between breaths.
"I don't know what's a Roomba." Because clearly, Europe is superior; why have Roombas when you have French maids? Not that I knew what a French accent sounded like. "Why is it following you?"
"Because the universe hates me," I snapped bitterly. I tried to calm myself by taking deeper breaths. It wasn't working; I was neither calmer nor taking deeper breaths. "I don't know what it's doing, honestly. I want to kick it."
"Right," the redhead remarked in a tone of voice that suggested she was dissatisfied with my answer but knew not to press. "Well, if you have your secrets, I won't pry."
"No," I was quick to say, not wanting any reason for this redhead to distrust me. "I don't have any secrets. I mean, this isn't a secret. I have no idea what is going on." I sat up, trying to take on my most beseeching look at the redhead even though all my colleagues told me I had "resting bitch face". Honestly, I was panicking a little, terrified at the idea that this girl with a gun - who nearly blew my head off at one point - didn't trust me. "I don't know why I'm here, why I'm being shot at, why I'm stuck here with you."
"Ah," the redhead allowed blankly even as I began to hyperventilate.
"Holy shit," I clawed at my throat in a panic, trying inhale and exhale air that felt like it was stuck there. "I can't breathe."
To my surprise, the redhead actually knelt down to where I was heaving on the ground, putting a hand on my back that was much gentler than I would've reasonably associated with a killer. "Calm down," she said, her voice soft and soothing. "You're going to be alright. I'm going to find a way...we are going to find a way to get off this arkology. Alright?"
"No, not alright," I said. I'd always been unnecessarily blunt. "But I'll try to breathe. I'm..." I paused, not entirely sure how to properly continue, before ultimately lamely settling on, "...I I'm sorry."
The redhead gave my shoulder a squeeze. "Don't worry about it." She waited for my breathing to slow down a bit - for me to stop hyperventilating, basically, which took a while - before asking, "I didn't catch your name."
Oh, right, it's that time of the year again. "Artemis," I said glumly.
The redhead blinked. "That's a strange name."
"Yeah," I sighed, "that's the curse of having parents who think names have to mean something."
There's something about the redhead's reaction that suggested my response didn't quite connect with her thoughts about the strangeness of my name, but she decided to let it go with a shrug. "I'm Scarlet."
I nodded. Then sighed explosively. "God, I have a million questions."
"Okay."
"I'll ask them later. I don't think now is a good time for question-asking."
"Okay."
"But can I ask one question first?" I added sheepishly. It was this thing that had bugged me terribly, nibbled at my brain ever since I first ran into the redhead. With all the guns, though, there just hadn't been any good moment to ask this question. Now was as good a time as any.
Scarlet shrugged. "Sure."
Shifting my weight awkwardly, I pointed at the top of her head, and then her backside. "Why do you have fox ears and a tail?"
I could feel the pressure from the barrel of the handgun against the soft, fleshy part of my jaw, feeling weirdly cold instead of searing hot like I otherwise would've expected. My fight-or-flight instincts seemed to be busy elsewhere as I opted instead for freezing up, wide-eyed like a little pussy. As the redhead stared at me with that cold, impassive look, I was waiting for that flash underneath my chain that would launch a bullet into my head and blow my brains into tomato juice, ready to put an end to my story.
Except there was a sudden crackle - the kind you'd associate with electricity - and suddenly the redhead was yelping and falling off of me to my right, just enough for me to suddenly reestablish my brain's connections to the rest of my body and roll away to the left in something that resembled blind panic.
As I did so, I realized that I rolled and bumped into something hard but not particularly tall. And when I finally scrambled back onto my knees, I realized what I had hit was, in fact, the little space Roomba with an appendage sticking out from its shell, looking like a robotic arm at a factory, except the very end was sparkling with electricity.
So it had shocked the redhead girl off me. That was nice. We're not even yet, but the space Roomba is steadily working off the emotional debt for all the grief it had caused me. And physical debt too, but that wasn't as important right now.
Still, I found myself locking glares with the redhead in front of me, who had similarly tumbled across the floor but had achieved a three-point landing, with her remaining hand holding the gun that was pointed at me. Or not at me, but the space Roomba, which happened to be in roughly the same direction anyways. There wasn't really anger in her eyes, just a kind of emptiness that people might've associated with the mugshot of a serial killer or a school shooter, focusing on me like I was some kind of pest to be eliminated. So I did the natural thing people do when faced with a complete stranger with a gun.
That is to say, I begged for my life.
Well, no, not really begged for my life. I wasn't that miserable. I just...asked a question as I waved my hands in front of me. Desperately. Specifically: "Wait, wait, why are you trying to kill me!?"
The redhead blinked in confusion, and when she blinked a second time, it seemed as if some kind of realization suddenly overcame her, and just like that, her eyes were no longer cold and clouded and empty, but danced with the kind of life that I saw in (and had been jealous of) frat boys and sorority girls when they were partying. Like someone who was human, with emotions.
"I didn't see you on the ship," she observed, her voice still bland but not quite as cold as before. I realized for the first time - despite this being the second time I heard her speak, but she had a gun under my chin then and that's my justification - that she had an accent I couldn't quite place. It definitely wasn't American, at least. European, perhaps? She did have pale skin. For however much that mattered. Not that I could recognize European accents.
Of course, that didn't really help explain anything at all, so I asked the obvious after a moment of complete blankness: "What ship?"
Again, the redhead blinked, tilting her head slightly to the side this time in clear confusion. "Are you trying to kill me?" she asked.
"What?" It was my turn to blink. "No! I'm not trying to kill you." I blinked again before realizing that maybe this statement of hers was something to panic over. "Wait, are people trying to kill you?" I looked over the redhead's shoulder and past the open doors where she had come from, taking note of the fact that there are three people still on the ground where I last saw them, except they weren't moving and what was unmistakably blood was beginning to pool on the floor. "Wait, did you kill them?"
The redhead, however, didn't seem super interested in answer my question right now as she looked at the space Roomba between us, still poised to strike with that robotic arm sparkling with electricity, almost resembling a scorpion in a weird way. The look of confusion turned into something deeper. Astonishment, perhaps, not quite believing what she was seeing in front of her. "Is that servitor protecting you?"
"You mean this Roomba?"
"No, that's a servi..." the redhead trailed off, frowned, then asked me, "...what's a 'Roomba'?"
So she came from a place that didn't have Roombas, I guessed. Which made me wonder if Europe had Roombas, but I suppose that really didn't matter all that much in the end. "Never mind. It was...trying to lead me somewhere."
The redhead's expression looked skeptical at this instead of just confused, but she nodded slowly, as if accepting this...for now, for the lack of a better alternative explanation. "Right," she nodded; there was a lilt to her voice that wasn't there before, something that seemed to give me the impression that she was, in general, a fairly cheery person. Also that she didn't really believe me right at the moment. "Were you a stowaway?"
Well, the redhead was talking about a ship earlier. Not that I knew anything about that. "I don't know?" I admittedly lamely. "I'm...not from here. I just woke up here a few weeks ago."
That skepticism on the redhead's face looked much more pronounced now, but she nodded again like someone that was eager to get to something else that was more important. "Right. Well, do you want out?"
Oh, boy, do I ever. "Yes!"
"Then you'd better follow me," the redhead announced, sliding something into her handgun in a way that kind of reminded me of movies where soldiers would reload. And in a way, the redhead - in terms of attire and demeanor - reminded me of a soldier. Or maybe a soldier of fortune, a mercenary, one of those combatants from private military companies that I used to hear on the news and see in movies as villains.
Not that I had any real idea of what she was, exactly, save for the fact that I saw her first when she was surrounded by three dead bodies now bleeding on the ground. "Um," I started, raising a hand awkwardly to shoulder-level, reminded of this little detail about the three dead bodies past the open door and suddenly not feeling all that hot about walking beside someone with a gun. "So...why did you kill them?"
The redhead was already beginning to move back in the direction of the room she came from, marching up to the bodies before picking up one of the guns on the ground. "Because they were trying to kill me."
...Yeah, it was a bit hard to argue with that, I supposed. Not that I knew whether or not she was telling the truth, but the fact that there were guns beside the dead bodies seemed to support that claim. Either way, the redhead slung the gun she picked up by the strap around her shoulder - some kind of rifle or submachine gun, I didn't know, not actually being any kind of gun person - and began moving on once again.
Not knowing what else to do, I followed sheepishly behind, not even having the presence of mind to pick up one of the other two guns on the floor. Not that I even knew how to use them anyways, and they likely would've been greater harm to myself than anyone else, but that's really just an excuse to say I wasn't in a frame of mind where I knew what the hell I was doing. And, behind me, the space Roomba followed, albeit flashing its light ever harder - I was surprised that was even possible - as if nagging at me to follow it instead of this mysterious and probably dangerous redhead with a gun who had killed three people and just tried to kill me.
Well, "tried" is past tense, after all. And she had stopped when she realized I hadn't been trying to kill her. That's...nice, I suppose? That I wasn't in immediate danger? Maybe that made her a considerate person? This place was doing something bad to my basic standard.
"We need to get back onto the Fortune's Wings," the redhead announced as she moved past another set of sliding doors, unphased by the fact that a complete stranger was following her; if anything else, she was giving the space Roomba following us a much more wary glance. And there was just something about the way she said "fortune's wings" that made me think the words needed to be capitalized. Like a name or something. "If we can't sneak back on, we're stuck here forever."
"Oh," I mouthed blankly. That was probably a bad thing. I mean, I had company now, but two weeks were enough to drive me near-crazy. I wanted off.
The redhead definitely knew the place better than I did, navigating its twists and turns deftly, moving through each door cautiously, as if expecting a threat behind every one. I wasn't sure if that meant she was an inhabitant here or if she just had a much better sense of direction than someone who needed Google Maps on her phone.
The silence was awkward. Here was finally someone who was willing to talk to me - even if she had two guns now - and we were just walking around in silence. Struggling to find something to talk about, I reached back into my memory for something that seemed at least relevant to our situation, asking, "So...is that a ship? Um, what you said, I mean. Fortune's Wings or something?"
"Yes," the redhead replied, moving towards the next set of doors, but approaching it from the side. The angle reminded me of how kids would try to get close to the automatic sliding doors of a supermarket without triggering the sensors that opened them.
"So...are we on an island?"
"No," the redhead answered, pressing herself against the walls of sliding doors that were still close, her gun - the longer one, not her handgun - now gripped in both hands, "we're on an arkology."
I copied her movements and pressed myself against the wall behind her. "What's an arkology?"
"Can I answer those questions later?" For what it was worth, the redhead did not actually sound impatient or frustrated; there was, in fact, a level of something that sounded suspiciously like earnestness in her rather matter-of-fact statement as she pointed calmly towards the doors. "The hangar is beyond these doors and I want to try to get in it before they set up any mounted guns."
"Oh, okay, sorry." I said that politely and with an appropriate amount of contriteness despite the back of my head telling me there was something wrong with her statement. Which I thought was nice because people usually complained I was too sharp and sarcastic and insincere. Which of course had nothing to do with the fact that the redhead in question had a gun in her hands, and was strangely generous enough to help me get out despite her being stuck in a situation that I didn't fully comprehend but which apparently necessitated a gun.
The redhead nodded, taking a breath as if to steel herself. "Ready?" she asked. The question was rhetorical; she was already moving towards the front of the doors, the two metallic panels sliding open soundlessly, and I was already beginning to take that first step, shifting my momentum forwards.
Myr foot had not yet even landed on the floor to complete that step when I realized exactly why I was having an uncomfortable thought at the back of my head. And now that my consciousness finally registered it, "uncomfortable" turned to "alarm". "Wait," I said blankly, "you said 'mounted gun'?"
My answer came as I found myself looking through the open door and towards what laid beyond it. It was the largest room I had come across in this facility thus far - no, easily the largest room I had ever seen, ever, looking like it was the size of a dozen football stadiums, if not more - stretching to the reaches of my vision. It formed a bit of an arc, and so I couldn't see the "end" of it before it turned away beyond my line of sight, as if I was moving out of a giant circular stadium, but even then it felt like I could stare down its end for miles. On the far side of this giant room hundreds of yards away, opposite of the door I was already stepping through, should've been a wall, except there wasn't. In fact, I found myself looking at what looked like a blue glowing window - the kind you'd maybe see at a rave club as decoration - and on the other side of it was...
...The starry night sky.
It's unmistakable: Clusters of stars against the black sky. Faint clouds of light that are supposed to be nebulae. A path away from the suffocation of an endless stretch of silent halls and lonely chambers. Freedom.
I might've appreciated the moment more, the realization that I was suddenly this close to getting out of there. I'm not a particularly emotional person, but it felt like an emotional moment.
Sadly, I had other things to worry about. Like the fact that the redhead beside me wasn't charging forward, and was in fact staying behind one of the two sliding doors. The fact that in front of me this time wasn't the smooth metallic floor that stretched on to the walls, but relatively narrower walkways - wide enough for at least two vans to easily pass each other side-by-side - that reminded me of a pier or factory walkway, suspended over what I assumed to be the sea or at least a distant floor, making me think I was actually stuck in a secret supervillain base under a mountain island or something. The fact that there was something at the end of one of these walkways a hundred yards in front of me: A strange-looking ship-like vessel about the size of a very large luxury yacht - the kind some rich asshole would throw big parties on - with an aged, brown hull that looked like it had spent years in Afghanistan, something that seemed so weirdly out of place in this pristinely white-and-gold facility. The fact that there were people in front of that ship - women, in fact, a bit more than half a dozen of them, clad in that hodgepodge of what Hollywood has convinced me is special forces attire, hardly dissimilar to those of the redhead I've been following - who were now pointing at me and the redhead and shouting something in a tone that made it clear they weren't trying to be friends. The fact that they were holding things in their hands that very suspiciously looked like guns that were now being raised and pointed in our direction.
Oh, and there was the fact that amongst them, there was something fixed onto a tripod. I've never fired a gun, nor was I a nerd, but that "something" looked very, very much like a machine gun. Something I sadly did not fully register until I had stepped past the doors and walls that would serve as a shield between me and any bullets fired in my direction.
I did the smart thing. I tripped and stumbled and scampered back to the door like the frightened little rat I was, making incoherent yelping noises, waiting for that inevitable moment when the machine gun would start spewing hot lead at us. The redhead, meanwhile, stood her ground, leaning out just slightly from the door, enough for her to admit her handgun, firing at the women fifty yards away in a stance that struck me as terrifyingly professional, the kind that one would imagine belonged to some kind of superspy or something. One of those quick shots actually managed to hit someone with a bullet that trailed blue as it tore through the air, the victim of her shot screaming as she slumped to the floor.
Then the machine gun started firing, and that's when I realized it wasn't a machine gun.
I was fifty yards away, around the corner of the door, and not even within the line of sight, and yet what the redhead had called a "mounted gun" fired in my general vicinity. What struck me as surprising at first - insomuch as I could be surprised in the middle of my panties-wetting terror - was the sound of the mounted gun rather than the sight of gunfire streaming through the open door I was hiding beside. It was clearly not the ear-shattering mini-explosions of firecrackers that Chinatown let off during Chinese New Year, if those firecrackers were actually on steroids. Rather, it sounded like a combination of a high-pitched mechanical whine and electricity, a combination of crackling and rumbling that a giant Tesla coil would make. Tragically, it was no easier on the ear, abruptly swallowing me into a world of an unholy cacophony, blasting my eardrums and my head with what my brain was deathly certain was all the explosions in the world, despite the fact that the gun wasn't even firing at me, but through the door of which I was beside, a detail that I was slower to notice in part because I was cowering behind the wall and curling into a ball and covering my ears and closing my eyes and screaming like a little girl.
When I did open my eyes a moment later, I noticed a second detail. The gunfire in our direction? The bullets that were striking the walls we' were hiding behind and through the door we tried to pass through? They weren't bullets. Rather, what streamed through the door was bright, thick, jagged line of light that looked like an unstable bolt of electricity, crackling violently as it twisted this way and that every few milliseconds. Despite lashing out like a whip, it didn't bend and twist enough to strike me from around the automatic doors, nor did it automatically swerve to strike the nearest soft and flesh target. Nor, in fact, did it simply melt the thick, pristine wall I was hiding behind, which seemed to suffer nary a scratch as it violently lashed this way and that in an attempt to kill the redhead and myself. But the twisting, crackling beam was enough to make me roll away in terror, not only because that lightning bolt was uncomfortably close to zapping me into charred jerky, but because, for all intents and purposes, the women I saw on the other side of this door had what was basically a literal lightning gun.
Hi, I have been kidnapped by secret elements of the government to a classified science fiction facility where military special forces test experimental weapons, including weapons from the future like a literal lightning gun that is spewing a steady stream of electricity or something at us. Please send help.
Amidst all of this, the redhead had similarly ducked back from where she was peeking out around the doorframe, reloading her handgun with the kind of calmness that one doesn't generally associate with "being shot at with a mounted gun". That coldness in her eyes - that deathliness in her gaze the first time we had locked stares as she shoved a gun under my chin - had returned, and I was even more certain that I had, proverbially speaking, picked the wrong horse, that this girl was crazy, and that I was going to die one way or another because of it.
"Holy shit!" I screamed in her direction, my voice shrill and lilting with clear panic. I must've looked like a massive sissy. I didn't find it in me to blame myself; I've witnessed gang violence before in the bad neighborhoods I had lived in, but never had I ever actually been shot at before, because I always maintained my distance; you learn to be sensitive about these things when you live in shitty places. Now my virgin shootout experience involved a literal lightning gun, and it was like the cherry on top of an already terrifying few weeks. "What the hell is that!?"
Despite having to raise her voice over the sound of the gunfire, the redhead sounded infuriatingly calm - making me look bad by extension - as she shouted back, "Plasma array!"
I would like to note, then, that tech from the future is officially here, and I am being murdered by it. More importantly: "Why are they shooting at you!?"
"On-site negotiations really didn't work out well!"
"What the hell in those negotiations did you do to piss them off that badly!?" I screamed. It occurred to me once again that I was stuck with a killer - a complete stranger in who had already killed, someone good at it, to my entirely uninformed observations - and that staying with her in the middle of this conflict I knew absolutely nothing about was increasingly looking like the result of an awful decision-making process. Except alternative choices - the totally nice-looking people fifty yards whose motivations are also entirely unknown to me - were currently being violently postponed by a combination of rifles and a mounted gun that was shooting not lightning, but plasma.
It didn't matter that maybe these people who were firing that plasma array maybe had perfectly legitimate reasons to try and kill this redhead, whom, for all I knew, might've been a terrorist or a serial killer or chewed with her mouth open. Under the circumstances, the redhead - the killer who nearly fired a bullet into my brain from under my jaw - suddenly seemed like an entirely reasonable person to stick with. It's funny how much fired and unfired bullets change one's perspective on how to justify horrible, horrible things.
For just a moment, the "plasma array" stopped firing - a moment in which my world isn't full of electric screeching and that crackling beam disappears - and the redhead leaned out from around the doorframe to fire several shots again. But this incurred a response of what is clearly gunfire - sounding more like actual guns this time, at least the guns that had been involved whenever there had been a shooting in the neighborhood - forcing the redhead to hide back behind the doorframe once more, followed by the return of the plasma array firing through the door in hopes of hitting anything, or at least deterring any counterattack.
This exchange of gunfire lasted for a few more moments before the redhead grimaced, pulling back behind the door and announcing to me, "This isn't working." And before I could fully process this statement, she stepped away from the door, allowing it to automatically close, and grabbed me by the wrist, shouting, " Let's go!"
And for a long, fleeting, surreal moment - where the world seemed to pass me by without me ever really taking full account of it - I was dragged through a dizzying chain of corridors and doors. We could've been going back the way whence we came, or we could've been going through an entirely new path. I didn't know, as much of a daze I was in. I'm sorry if you expected me to already be some kind of stone-cold killer, but I was only a bit more than two weeks into my kidnapping, and for the low, low price of having being shot at with experimental prototype military weapons from space, I was already missing my dingy apartment, my moldy mattress, my dead-end job, my sexist and racist colleagues, and my half-senile mother who was somehow not yet senile enough to ask why I wasn't making grandchildren for her.
Seconds passed. Maybe minutes. It was hard to tell, in my current state of mind. All I knew was that eventually, the redhead stopped and let go of my wrist. She looked back towards the door we stepped through, seemed to think about things, then declared a moment afterwards: "They shouldn't be able to find us. Their only other tracker is kind of a hack."
Ah. She was a tracker. I realized that I didn't understand what that meant and - right at that particular moment - didn't care. I collapsed onto the floor, sprawling across its cold metal surface, wheezing my lungs out, looking blankly upwards. I didn't care whether or not the floor was dirty or bad for my back. I was small, thin, malnourished, and horribly out-of-shape. This was the hardest I had ever ran in my life, my body starting to tremble as I started to come down from my adrenaline high, leaving me with only this cold, numb feeling - realization, really - of "holy shit, holy shit, I probably almost died five different times in the last fifteen minutes". If I had more energy, I would've curled up into a ball and stayed there for the next hour or something.
Beside me, too close for me to ignore it but far enough that I couldn't reach out and smack it, the space Roomba - or "servitor", whatever - continued to intensely flash its blinking light in my face.
This was a fact that did not escape the redhead's notice. "The servitor is still following you," she remarked, continuing to stare at the space Roomba with an expression of muted confusion and astonishment.
"Is that what you call the Roomba?" I asked between breaths.
"I don't know what's a Roomba." Because clearly, Europe is superior; why have Roombas when you have French maids? Not that I knew what a French accent sounded like. "Why is it following you?"
"Because the universe hates me," I snapped bitterly. I tried to calm myself by taking deeper breaths. It wasn't working; I was neither calmer nor taking deeper breaths. "I don't know what it's doing, honestly. I want to kick it."
"Right," the redhead remarked in a tone of voice that suggested she was dissatisfied with my answer but knew not to press. "Well, if you have your secrets, I won't pry."
"No," I was quick to say, not wanting any reason for this redhead to distrust me. "I don't have any secrets. I mean, this isn't a secret. I have no idea what is going on." I sat up, trying to take on my most beseeching look at the redhead even though all my colleagues told me I had "resting bitch face". Honestly, I was panicking a little, terrified at the idea that this girl with a gun - who nearly blew my head off at one point - didn't trust me. "I don't know why I'm here, why I'm being shot at, why I'm stuck here with you."
"Ah," the redhead allowed blankly even as I began to hyperventilate.
"Holy shit," I clawed at my throat in a panic, trying inhale and exhale air that felt like it was stuck there. "I can't breathe."
To my surprise, the redhead actually knelt down to where I was heaving on the ground, putting a hand on my back that was much gentler than I would've reasonably associated with a killer. "Calm down," she said, her voice soft and soothing. "You're going to be alright. I'm going to find a way...we are going to find a way to get off this arkology. Alright?"
"No, not alright," I said. I'd always been unnecessarily blunt. "But I'll try to breathe. I'm..." I paused, not entirely sure how to properly continue, before ultimately lamely settling on, "...I I'm sorry."
The redhead gave my shoulder a squeeze. "Don't worry about it." She waited for my breathing to slow down a bit - for me to stop hyperventilating, basically, which took a while - before asking, "I didn't catch your name."
Oh, right, it's that time of the year again. "Artemis," I said glumly.
The redhead blinked. "That's a strange name."
"Yeah," I sighed, "that's the curse of having parents who think names have to mean something."
There's something about the redhead's reaction that suggested my response didn't quite connect with her thoughts about the strangeness of my name, but she decided to let it go with a shrug. "I'm Scarlet."
I nodded. Then sighed explosively. "God, I have a million questions."
"Okay."
"I'll ask them later. I don't think now is a good time for question-asking."
"Okay."
"But can I ask one question first?" I added sheepishly. It was this thing that had bugged me terribly, nibbled at my brain ever since I first ran into the redhead. With all the guns, though, there just hadn't been any good moment to ask this question. Now was as good a time as any.
Scarlet shrugged. "Sure."
Shifting my weight awkwardly, I pointed at the top of her head, and then her backside. "Why do you have fox ears and a tail?"
- Location
- in the trash
"Right back at you. Why don't you have fox ears and a tail?"
- Location
- Not the asylum anymore
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Actually, did any of the other guys have animal features?
Whiskey Golf
Being of Editing & Technical Assistance
- Location
- Chained to my desk
Because fox ears and tails are the best, duh. *points at quest link in sig(
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yes. Yesss. Yessss!
Can I just mention that this is a very, very good line? And also deserves a
but I felt the rest of the chapter made it deserve a like.
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Dirtnap
Kanmusu Affecionado
Ah so, Kei also prefers foxes. This is good civ.
Please do continue, i wanna see what happens next!
Also I'm going to plug literally one of the most healing animes out there this season since it's also involves foxes.
Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko. It is 100% fluff and relaxing.
Please do continue, i wanna see what happens next!
Also I'm going to plug literally one of the most healing animes out there this season since it's also involves foxes.
Sewayaki Kitsune no Senko. It is 100% fluff and relaxing.
- Location
- London
With her reaction to this, the fact that everybody mentioned thus far is a woman and the whole
thing, I'm guessing everybody is the result of some big genetic engineering and/or cloning thing.
Also, needs a trademark.
- Location
- National Capital Region, USA
Watched and followed! This is some fun, sharp writing, Kei! 