It's time to awaken.His body prickled and cracked as the deep freeze rushed out of the pod. A gleam, beaming gaze of red eyes opened. He took in the vision of disorder and disaster on the other side of the tempered glass screen; although the cold of the pod layered a foggy residue upon his side of the veil, the picture was clear enough. Even as scattered and scared as he was, he had no issue comprehending that someone or something had upended the space around him. But knowing this did nothing to quell the confused anxiety that permeated through his beating heart.
Breathing heavily, he recoiled to the back of the pod, splaying out against its far side. He looked and felt like cornered animal, still sorting out which stream of adrenaline he should follow.
Run for it? Hide here? Fight and find a way out? He had barely enough time to think these options over when something tugged at him... an instinctual urge that pulled him from the core of his soul.
Go.With a laboring effort, as though his body were adorned by heavy weights, he pulled himself up to the edge of the pod and scaled up and out along the metallic sides. His joints popped; his muscles stretched; his vertebrae all realigned with a resonating glissando, punctuating with an accent at the base of his neck. Crossing his body through the threshold he gasped and heaved strained breaths, each exhale dispersing the evaporating mist from the cryopod.
As he straddled his legs over to the outside of the pod his strength escaped him. The resulting descent saw his body fall into a log roll, the end of which set his face intimately close to the cold, bloodstained concrete floor.
Come to me.Recapturing a degree of fortitude he pressed into an upward dog position. As his muscles flexed, a sharpness cut through his body. I a pained heave of air, he released a guttural noise. Something of a cross between an agonized scream and a primal roar reverberated around the room. Both sounds came out in a shrill harmonization, as though two voices were ringing in unison from a single set of vocal chords.
For all he knew, his yell might have drawn unwanted attention to his presence in the room. Had he not been fighting for every rise it took for him to place his feet under him, he might have been more concerned about being discovered.
Once upright, he stole a moment to feel the body with which he had this far struggled to move.
For all of the things he didn't know he had forgotten, a deep inner sense told him that this wasn't quite right. He felt heavier than he should given his size, with a host of muscles that seemed too well-crafted to have caved in not even a minute earlier. He surveyed himself further... a run of veins visible through the skin as black lines. And more nagging a matter, odd, sharp flashes of pain kept a beat atop his head and in the back of his shoulders. Beyond any of these observations remained the unwieldy nature of the form. He was hard pressed to believe that his was a body that his mind was meant to occupy.
But that was all irrelevant when he thought on it. He needed answers, and the best he could do was hope that he'd get used to carrying himself in time.
He gazed around at the room he had awoken into. Other than the mess of prior violence, he noticed there were other pods like the one he had crawled out from. They were all open and empty; there must gave been others then. Of so were they still around, and did they know more than he did? As his head rounded the space, his line of sight aligned with his own pod. He turned back to face it, looking it up and down for clues.
There were two that stuck out immediately.
First, was a series of numbers and letters, etched onto a placard at the top of the pod.
DM-066-I06-07
Not a name to go by, but "D" seemed good enough until something better was dug up.
The second clue was in the form of a small chain hanging by the pod as though it were there for him to find. Attached to the chain was a pair of small stainless steel cards... there seemed to be words on them. He excitedly stumbled his way to the chain only for his heart to drop more quickly than it had risen; whatever information was upon the tags was scratched and burned beyond his comprehension. Nonetheless, he took the chain and draped it upon his shoulders. It seemed the proper thing to do.
No closer to further progress, he turned his attention back to the rest of the room.
The elevator had been overlooked by his previous take. Now, though, he noticed the indicator light flickering above it. It was stopped on a floor above him. If it was being used, that meant there were likely other people about. Seeing it was his only option outside of staying in the room with the empty pods, he hobbled over to the panel on the wall and pressed hard into the button that would call the lift back down.
He had to find a way out. He wasn't sure he knew that, but he did.
EricWald,
Estylwen,
Mole,
Apoalo,
JustAnna,
Bacon,
Sunflower,
rabidbacon,
Crimson Flame,
headintheclouds
