Enter the Rig Chapter 1
North and South of La La Land
North Romania Seagrove was a normal teenager. But she never thought she'd be in this mess. The teen bent down, feeling the foreign, sticky liquid that lay on the ground. It oozed between her fingers, wet, and oddly a sick gray-green in color. North had never in her life seen anything like it. It had a consistency like a cross of oil and rubber, with a high viscosity. She grimaced.
"That's just wrong…" She trailed off.
North shouldn't have been surprised by now. After all, she'd seen worse than some unidentifiable substance coming from the walls. How had she gotten caught up in this? Where had she gone wrong? North thought back to a few hours ago. Then she'd been happy. Then she didn't have to run. Then… then her life hadn't been this messed up.
Just a few hours ago, North had been in school, learning skills she was sure she'd never use. She didn't see how factoring in these ridiculously complicated ways could ever be needed in life, or how knowing what kinds of sentences she was writing would make a difference. The last thing she could remember before this twisted, sick world was dozing during Algebra.
But after her world went black, she remembered waking up in a gray room, the expanse impossible to estimate due to the darkness that choked around from the right and left. North looked around, but the black blended with the gray of the room. She couldn't tell if there was much more room, but she couldn't see any windows or doors. There left only one other option: look deeper into the room.
North walked into the black, her vision limited to only a few feet in front or behind her. Her first thoughts were if anyone came up behind she wouldn't be able to know until they were on her. North walked on, but as before, no way out was visible to her. Not even a skylight was built into the room.
As she continued on, North found that the room began to dissipate around her, piece by piece, becoming nothing. She found herself alone, in a dark, foreboding place. A second look around told her it was vaguely similar to a forest, but she knew of many forests. Which was closer in resemblance to this one was an enigma to her, as she couldn't distinguish one tree from another.
North walked with a cautious step, unsure if this environment would, too, degenerate beneath her. She walked on, her feet drumming against the soil and her heart reverting back to normal-for now at least. In the night's cold and impartial silence she began to ease her fears. Once her guard was down, a shadow came from a bush, blurred and dark in color.
She flailed, falling to the hard ground with the weight of the creature on top of her. It was the size of an average bear cub. It took the vague form of a bear, but it wasn't. With a flash of lightning, North could see that it was made up of a dark substance- the best she could do was relate it to debris from something- held loosely together by a pitch black cloud of visible energy. Its eyes glowed a sickly green. Its growl sounded demonic and sort of metallic, reminding her a little of nails on a chalkboard.
The thing looked at her hard in her eye, then was gone. Rain began its decent from the sky, and North was soaked through to her skin as she walked farther into the forest. On and on she went, the drone of insects and the thumping of her feet the only company to her. Then, everything went black to her. Falling. She was falling. She hit the ground, loosing sensation in her body. North woke with a start, finding herself locked in an unfamiliar house.