A screeching alarm ripped through Ayelen's ears, jerking her awake and slamming her head against the roof of her bed cubby. Red light bled through the cracks her bedroom door as her heart raced.
What?
She shot out of bed, rubbing her head as she threw open her door, looking out into the hallway. Doors were flung open in every direction, some occupied by anxious teammates - she could barely hear herself, let alone any of them over the screeching.
"What's happening?" She yelled to Gwen, their rooms directly across from each other. She could see Jayce, Kwynn, Dori and Cecelia in their doorways, bodies tense and staring daggers into their rooms.
"I… I don't know! Kenzie, Kali, and Danny all ran off towards the airlock, but she told us to wait here in case something tries coming through a window!"
Oh, what the FUCK…
"...I-I'm gonna go up there with them," she yelled back, cautiously guiding herself down the hall and through the living room with her hands on the walls. She was shaking so bad that her knees felt as if they were going to give out, her breath ragged with adrenaline. Her hands and feet were going numb again.
The screech of the alarm suddenly cut off, the red light quickly being replaced by the normal fluorescents. Ayelen groaned as she instinctively shut her eyes against the sudden change. She could hear the pained complaints of her colleagues behind her.
Before her, the missing three were all crowded around the airlock door, taking turns to peer through the glass.
"Hey, so, uh, what's going on?" she asked, throat scratching slightly from yelling. Her ears rung slightly, though she could hear a muffled scratching coming through the door.
"...There's something in the airlock," Kenzie stated, voice shaking with anger. "Take a look."
Through the glass, a spindly creature was frantically springing about the room, desperately trying to find an escape. Elongated, vine-like limbs bent to create a strange, 'n' shaped creature; it had no head, and was covered top to bottom in fine hairs that resembled moss. Sharp teeth ran along the inside of each limb, and it desperately tried clinging to the walls of the airlock with them, though they didn't hold, leaving it to slip and slide around in a panic.
It was scared of them.
Kenzie took the strange, small box out of her pocket from before and held it to the glass.
"Cover your ears," she said flatly before pressing a button.
"No, wait. Kenzie don't-!" Kali pleaded, but she was quickly cut off by a deafening screech and painfully bright flashing light from the box.
The creature in the airlock repeatedly flung itself against the door to the outside, absolutely distraught by the box.
It tore Ayelen's heart apart to see something so scared.
Kenzie lifted her thumb from the button, ending the horrible screech and light. The poor creature seemed to have given up on escape and pathetically curled itself into a ball on the floor, disguising itself as a rock.
Kali was livid.
"Why do you keep doing that? He's terrified of us, and you're clearly hurting him!"
Kenzie stared her dead in the eyes, a death grip on the box, her voice deadly quiet and dripping with anger.
"We were told there was nothing on this planet, that we would be safe without weapons. I was given this box just before we'd left and was told that it would 'scare off anything that got too close.' They lied to us. We still have no connection with Earth, there's clearly dangerous things on this planet… who's to say that they didn't just send us out here to die?"
"But why would they do that," Danny interjected. "Let's be real: to spend billions of dollars to train us up, build a rocket, and get us here and back is just way too much effort to put into killing off a group of people. Besides, why would they even want us dead? What have we done?"
Kenzie pursed her lips, saying nothing as she stared off into space, debating something.
"Artemis," she suddenly called. "Cut off the air flow in the airlock, but gradually. I want to see what happens."
"Boy, what are you doing?" Ayelen asked, growing anxious by her continuous lack of empathy for the poor creature.
"If Kali's not going to let me kill it, I at least want to drug it enough to study its behavior. We don't know what it is or what it's capable of."
The thing in the airlock didn't move. If anything, it seemed to just curl in on itself further. As she observed its suffering, the three behind her arguing, she realized that the sounds around her were slowly drowning out, becoming more distant - a grey filter blurred her vision. The world itself seemed to slow down as her body began heavy and sluggish. She was vaguely aware of Kali yelling and yanking the door open in slow-motion before running back out into the base with a rock in her arms, streaks of dull color trailing behind her. Everything was fading.
She swayed momentarily, eyes closing before collapsing to the ground.
"AYELEN!"
A screeching alarm ripped through Ayelen's ears, jerking her awake and slamming her head against the roof of her bed cubby. Red light bled through the cracks her bedroom door as her heart raced.
What?
She shot out of bed, rubbing her head as she threw open her door, looking out into the hallway. Doors were flung open in every direction, some occupied by anxious teammates - she could barely hear herself, let alone any of them over the screeching.
"What's happening?" She yelled to Gwen, their rooms directly across from each other. She could see Jayce, Kwynn, Dori and Cecelia in their doorways, bodies tense and staring daggers into their rooms.
"I… I don't know! Kenzie, Kali, and Danny all ran off towards the airlock, but she told us to wait here in case something tries coming through a window!"
Oh, what the FUCK…
"...I-I'm gonna go up there with them," she yelled back, stepping out of her room. Just as she did, the alarm suddenly cut off, the red light quickly died and was replaced by dim emergency lights. Ayelen froze as everyone in the hall collectively held their breath.
"Oh, god. What the fuck is that?" Jayce whispered frantically, pointing behind her and Gwen.
Ayelen felt her stomach drop as her feet went numb, hands threatening to do the same. Slowly, heart beating a hole in her chest, she turned around.
In the dark, someone stood at the end of the hallway.
Through the shadows, Ayelen's terrified brain merged featured together, telling her that this person had no definitive features on their face - it was all smeared away, as if crudely done by an old, dried up eraser, leaving streaks of discoloration sprawled about; she couldn't focus on it, almost as if her eyes refused to do so. A white lab coat was draped lazily on their body.
She knew this person.
Gwen, never one to let fear get the better of her, slowly began inching herself towards the person, reaching a hand out.
What is she doing?
She fought the urge to reach out for her, choosing to stay perfectly still in her doorway instead.
What if it's movement based…?
Gwen now stood in front of the person, who hadn't moved at all, and it quickly became apparent just how tall this stranger was: towering a solid two or three feet above her. She reached a shaking hand out, refusing to make a sound, and all the while not taking her eyes off of its face.
"...I can't feel it," she hissed to Ayelen. "Like, my hand is touching it, but it doesn't feel like anything's there."
Everyone in the hall stared at the person for a second longer, slowly releasing the breath they'd been holding as Gwen's message was passed down the hall, their tense bodies relaxing just a little.
CRACK.
The tall person suddenly jerked their neck down at an impossible angle, nonexistent eyes boring into Gwen's. A scream so guttural that it chilled Ayelen's soul tore through the mosaic of skin across their face as the body gave way, liquidizing from the legs up and drenching Gwen in an abhorrent mixture of human fluids and organs as it dissolved into the floor.
Without a second's hesitation, the group sprinted towards the airlock and away from… whoever that was, Gwen needing to be carried as she was frozen in shock.
At the airlock, Kenzie, Kali and Danny all spun around in surprise as the group clambered to a halt to catch their breath. Kali was cradling a large rock in her arms.
"...There was a person… ! There was… a person… in the hallway…" Jayce huffed, shakily setting Gwen down. She promptly sat and held her position, stiff as a board.
"What do you mean?" Kenzie demanded.
"There was a fucking huge person at the end of the bedroom hallway, a-and Gwen went to go touch it… but it didn't have a face, and then it screamed at her and… dissolved into a pile of organs and blood, a-and now she's, like, completely catatonic," he stressed, pointing to her motionless form.
The group that had arrived from the bedrooms were beginning to panic and swell with chatter.
"EVERYONE SHUT UP!" Kenzie yelled, successfully locking all eyes - except for Gwen's - on her.
She took a breath steadying breath before speaking in a softer tone:
"Look… there's no one else here. It's just us. H-How could there be anyone else?" Her stern disposition was beginning to fade away as a nervous edge crept into her voice. She shook herself.
"I-I'll prove it. Watch." She began pointing to everyone, one by one.
"One,
"Two,
"Three,
"Four,
"Five,
"Six,
"Seven,
"Eight,
"Nine.
"...
"...Ten."
Her heart lurched and her body numbed. Ayelen could see the blood drain from Kenzie's face as she stared behind the group, finger frozen in mid air. They all turned.
There, in the darkness of the living room, stood another person. Another faceless, inhumanly tall person wearing a lab coat who felt all too familiar.
No one dared move as a painful silence filled the air, the person as stock-still as Gwen.
"OH MY FUCKING GOD. AYELEN!"
The scream was so violently raw that it hurt Ayelen's own throat just to hear it. As if serrated by an invisible knife, a massive gash in the void of the person's face opened up, pouring out the contents of their face. It wasn't just as simple as their face began bleeding, no. It was as if the face had previously been a clogged drain, and the gash was the thing to open it back up, inviting the skin, muscles and bones to pour forward into the open air with the same liquidity of water; the face was melting onto the floor.
In that same second, the person's body violently jerked to the side, distorting the familiar human shape as bones cracked out of place and tendons snapped from the sheer force. The broken frame of a person then sprinted at them with a speed no one would have thought possible with its broken limbs, its body liquidating just as the face had as it ran, forcibly collapsing it into the floor where it fully dissolved into a horrendous trail of organs and fluids.
No one moved, their brains still trying to comprehend what they'd seen.
Gwen's suddenly spoke up, her eerily innocent and monotonous voice tearing everyone from their horrified trances:
"There's a spike in the ceiling."
Looking up, there was indeed a small, metal spike protruding out of the ceiling, slowly dripping blood onto the floor below.
"Bitch… what the fuck," was Kali's immediate response, still cradling the rock.
Another heavy silence panned out before Kwynn spoke up.
"I'll… I'll go see where it's coming from…" Her voice was distant and her eyes were glossing over as she headed to her locker for her suit.
No one opposed this.
Jayce then spoke:
"Uh… here, Dori. Climb up on my shoulders and take some of the paneling off and see if… if there's anything up there."
As Dori uneasily made her way up onto Jayce's shoulders, Ayelen saw Kwynn standing in the airlock, bracing herself to open the door to the outside. She took a deep breath and pulled the door open, froze for a second, and then quickly slammed it back shut with an echoing bang. She shuffled back to the group, eyes more distant than ever.
"There's nothing out there," she whispered.
"What do you mean?" Danny asked, looking around as everyone slowly regain a bit of themselves.
"...It's just a void… Just endless black…" Her face was as desolate as someone who'd recently been told they'd lost a loved one. Without further explanation, she made her way over to Gwen and sat down with her, pulling her knees up to her face and burying her head in her arms.
Dori, having successfully placed herself on Jayce's shoulders, realized that she had no screwdriver on her and had someone fetch one from her room. With that, she unscrewed one of the panels around the small spike, handed it to Jayce, and stuck her head into the ceiling.
She tensed.
"...There's nothing… up here?" she asked, extremely confused by what she was seeing. The spike wasn't protruding from a hole in the ceiling, let alone the roof. It simply appeared as if someone had taken it and glued it to one side of the panel, leaving the other side completely flawless.
"What'd ya mean?"
"There's literally nothing. No hole in the ceiling, no continuation of the spike. Nothing. It just ends on that side."
"What happens if you touch it?"
She stared at him in disbelief, sass creeping into her voice.
"You saw what happened when Gwen touched that person, and I am not having that happen to me!"
Mumbling an apology, Jayce handed her the panel to screw back into place. As she tightened the last screw, the center of the panel suddenly shot out and back in with an impossible smoothness; a the shape of a hand was viciously failing against the metal, trying to force itself out as if fighting against putty.
Reacting faster than Dori, Jayce stepped away from the panel and helped her off of his shoulders as a broken, charred arm slid out from the ceiling and grabbed onto the spike for leverage.
It was pulling itself out.
With an impressive heave and a chilling, dry crunch, a body fell from the ceiling and collapsed into a heap on the ground. The acrid smell of burnt hair forced its way down every throat in the room.
It was burnt almost beyond recognition. Every inch of its exposed skin was charred to a blackened crisp, and bludging, pus-filled welts that were all-too ready to explode lay scattered about; the entirety of its left half had caved in on itself, leaving bones and remnants of muscles sticking out at unnatural angles, and its left arm and leg had been violently torn from the body. Pus and blood pooled around it, and it shook painfully with each raspy, congested breath.
It was Gwen.
… But Gwen was sitting right there. Behind Ayelen.
Her remaining brown eye stared pleadingly up at her, before she took another rattling breath and spoke:
"Please… please kill me." Her voice was so pitiful.
Ayelen whipped around to look at the others, panicking as her overwhelmed brain tried to figure out what to do.
No one moved.
They'd all frozen in their place, glassy eyes staring directly at her.
Silence fell over them as Gwen's rasping breaths fell quieter.
An explosive CRACK suddenly filled the room as each of her friends' jaws unhinged, their necks violently snapping forward and back into place. They shifted to face her, clipping through whatever may have been in the way. A collective scream tore through their open throats before simultaneously imploding, drenching Ayelen and every nearby surface in the base with gore. Bone shards violently ricocheted off of the walls, imbedding themselves into whatever unfortunate thing found itself in their way.
She stood there, staring out at her shaking, gore-soaked body. It was too much.
"It's too loud… It's too loud," she whispered to herself as racking sobs shook her body, her eyes burning with tears.
"...It's too loud…" She slowly eased herself to the floor, curling up in a ball next to the now-silent body of the Gwen and sobbed freely, wishing so desperately that Luvenia were here. That thought brought a new wave of despair upon her.
"...Artemis…" she whispered, holding herself.
No response.
"Artemis!" Frustration clawed at her throat, threatening to overtake her as well.
No response.
"ARTEMIS!" she wailed, sitting up and throwing a fist against the floor.
A terrible, drawn out computerized screech came through her speakers, forcing Ayelen to slap her hands over her ears, the sound acting as a catalyst for more frustrated tears. It was hard to breath.
No words came through.
"Artemis, w-what am I supposed to d-do!" Her breaths caught in her throat as she curled up in a ball again, wiping her nose. "... What am I supposed to do…"
Another screech sounded before quickly being cut off. Artemis' spoke in a monotone.
"Go outside."
A quiet sniff from Ayelen's end before she answered.
"...O-Okay…" Slowly pulling herself from the floor, she made her way to her locker, absentmindedly flicking off a piece of skin from the handle. Her body went through the motions of putting her suit on, mind a million miles away.
She stepped outside.
Before her lay the grey, grass-like stalks that had always surrounded the base, and the shifting veil of gravity beyond.
She made her way to it.
Artemis' suddenly spoke through her helmet:
"Warning! Shifts in gravity are imminent. Turn back immediately!"
She found that, after a while, she didn't need to click the buttons to release her boots - they came up just fine without it.
She stood at the edge of their safety ring.
"Warning! Shifts in gravity are imminent. Turn back immediately!"
Tentatively, she stuck a hand out into the pulsating air.
Her hand wasn't immediately crushed, nor was it ripped off of her body.
There was no change.
Artemis' voice was distorting.
"Warning! Shifts in gravity are imminent. Turn back!"
She made her way into the grey void. Behind her, she could see the base and the ship sitting as they always had. Before her was a grey, flat void that faded into a light on the horizon.
"Turn back!"
She stopped and slowly took her suit off.
Nothing.
She didn't explode. Nothing popped out of her skull, nothing inside of her ruptured.
Nothing changed.
She walked towards the light on the horizon. Artemis' voice suddenly echoed across the empty sky above her.
The world faded to white.
"You've broken reality."