Kate did sleep uninterrupted through the night, but once she began to stir, she knew something was strange almost immediately. As she awoke she realized she was not dreaming but awake and disoriented. For some reason what had felt like a dream had turned out to be reality- her eyes were in fact already open, and she was in her living room, not her bed. She tried to blink but nothing happened, so she sleepily raised her head and looked around instead. Two alarming facts became apparent very quickly- one, the air tasted strange, and two, she was surrounded by the coils of some kind of giant serpent. She sat up and rolled over all at once, and the body of the snake writhed suddenly. As she moved her necklace slipped down her neck and continued to slip down until it rested at the base of her coils. "What the hell is this...?" She muttered, tasting the air over and over. She twisted her neck, looking for her body and limbs, and finding only a monstrous ocean of snake wound around an industrial cable spool that had been somehow set up in the living room. Giant beige and chocolate speckled masses of coils that didn't fit on the spool lay heaped over the couch and around the rest of the furniture on the room. She paused in confusion, taking in the scene. Her dazed brain made several observations- I seem to be a giant snake. That cable spool should be sitting out in the yard, not in this room. I am a giant snake. I am in my living room. Why am I a giant snake in my living room?
Answers not forthcoming, she resolved to un-spool herself. With little effort she quickly discovered this was a lot easier said than done. The spool did not turn easily, and her new found flexibility did not lend itself to unwinding. Her necklace had slipped far down her body and was now resting at the point that her girth stopped it. It had become uncomfortably tight as she contorted her body to free herself and she had no way to loosen it.
Eventually free of the spool, she and it were still taking up a considerable amount of the living room. She wondered where to start looking for answers. Her bedroom?
Climbing the stairs was less of a hassle than hauling her forward coils out from under her heaps of most-recently-despooled coils. This is ridiculous, she thought. Surely natural snakes did not have these problems. More or less untangled, she mounted the stairs and made her way to the second floor.
Her bedroom door was closed. She nosed it in hope that it would slip open. No luck.
She sighed. So much for that idea. She peered through the wooden slats of the bannister. Her lounge room was still full of a chaotic mess of snake, despite the fact that twenty feet of it was draped up the stairs. She u-turned and followed her body all the way back down. I have to call Zach. He'll know what to do.
She wound her body to the telephone, and looked at it momentarily. Damn.
This was going to take some getting used to.
