The rain was deafening. The percussive sounds of water filled the canvas tent with a kind of eerie stillness, as if the world outside had simply ceased to be between the rolling thunder and cacophonous noise of a rain storm gone weeks overdue. Mizuko had fallen asleep as the first pitter patter of rain had swept in over the hill, her internet crusade shelved for the night. In the end she'd only gotten around to a few Chirruper posts defaming Caped Baldy and one scathing review on (H)elp a sort of anonymous reviewing sight for civilian/hero interactions. She hadn't been surprised to see that out of a possible ten stars Baldy had an aggregate score of a two-point-five. A ton of the reviews claimed he was a "glory hunter" or something similar and more than a few chose to directly reference a large-scale battle that had occurred between Deep Sea King and several heroes last year; that single incident had bombed his score beyond recognition within the first few months of his formal entry into the system. Honestly that was kind of amazing, she hadn't even known people's scores could drop that fast! She really had to wonder why someone like Demon Cyborg was bothering with a guy like Saitama, but then she could understand being in dating a useless jerk. She had done that before, memorably and on several occasions. It was probably some sort of weird sex thing, it always seemed to be some kind of weird sex thing. Always.

The darkness inside the tent was nearly complete, cut through only by a sliver of ambient light from the open flap at the back of the tent. Most nights Mizuko would have shut it before she went to bed, but with the heavy oppressive heat not dissipating until late into the night lately and the damp heavy humidity of the thunderstorm she had felt it was probably in her best interest to let in what little cool air there was to be had inside. In the end it had only alleviated the heat by a half measure. She had started under a thin blanket but within a few hours had migrated into a loose-limbed sprawl across her bed leaving it rucked up against the footboard. Thunder rumbled overhead as she tossed this way and that - clumsy hands pushing her sweat matted hair away from her face with every uneasy rotation. Nothing seemed comfortable tonight; not the bed, not the weather, not even her dreams.

In a better kinder world those nightmares would have kept her awake or given her some prophetic dream warning; but in this world they only made her groggy and slow to react. It started by dragging her out of bed cracking her skull against the packed dirt floor in one smooth pull. The shock of it tore her out of sleep with viciousness. Her first through was that there had been a landslide to toss her around like this, they weren't uncommon but one of this size (big enough to pull her bed down? To throw her to the ground? It was so hard to parse what was happening in the moment-) would be devastating. Unfortunately for Mizuko this wasn't a natural disaster at play, it would have been better for her if it had been. No this was something worse.

Time seemed to stretch out in the next few seconds, softly out of focus and then dialing in to photo-realistic horrific realization. Her left ankle felt hot, almost uncomfortably so. She was on the floor when she shouldn't be. Her head hurt and it's shouldn't. She was awake, and she wasn't supposed to be.

The room was silent, thunder rumbling overhead. She struggled to string a thought together as she blinked her eyes open against a sudden rush of tears, should she be screaming right now? Isn't that what you did in times like this? Belatedly she made the attempt choking back tears, working her throat and mouth convulsively. Her mouth moved, her chest stretched, her throat tightened but nothing happened, her mouth wrapping around silent vowels. The terror was absolute and immediate, she couldn't scream. She COULDN'T SCREAM. Air hissed silently between her teeth as she bucked with the harsh realization; it wasn't that she wasn't screaming it was that there was no sound. Everything around her was freakishly, hellishly, deadly silent. A talent?! She thought dizzily though she had no time to further contemplate the thought. The light sheet she had gone to bed with tangled around her legs as she made an abortive attempt to sit, confused and disoriented pupils blown wide as she searched the oppressive darkness for any clue as to what was going on.

Something was in the room with her, something was attacking her. A large heavy vicelike grip was all she could feel, something lifting her up up up by the ankle until her knee gave a bright hot flare of pain as the full weight of her body jerked to a halt. In the darkness above, the roof of the tent distended and undulated, the canvas warping and moving as if being displaced by a something unseen. Terror leapt through her, her skin going clammy cold as if all of the water inside of her had suddenly been wrung out in the space of a blink. Heart thundering, she groped upwards as the thing began to move towards the back of the tent.

Pain howled down her leg as she managed bend upwards and clamp her fingers around what felt like a brawny arm. Desperation made her hands into claws- fingernails raking frantically in an attempt to inflict any amount of pain on her attacker. The thing flinched and the band around her ankle released dropping her heavily onto the dirt floor, it had not apparently expected her to fight back with such a sudden viciousness (that thought sent a spike of heady elation down her spine she would think about later). The smooth slick feeling of blood between her fingers startled her, it was still warm. Dazed and unable to celebrate her small victory for even a moment she was unable to avoid the next blow, invisible as it was. It drove all the air from her abdomen and all thoughts from her mind. The world simply, stopped, or so it seemed. Her body lurched backwards with the force of it. She hit the leg of her desk with an utterly silent crash, the cheap folding table crumpled over her, unable to support its own weight with one leg struck down.

By all rights the tent should have been filled with the sounds of struggle but it remained as eerily quiet as it had been when Mizuko fell asleep. Whatever the monster was doing was keeping any noise from being generated in the struggle down to the repetitive but soothing noise of her ancient laptop's cooling fan which droned incessantly despite any and all attempts to fix it. A blanket of terrifying silence, one she was increasingly sure she might never be meant to leave. She had no time to recover before she was being jerked out from under the collapsed table into the middle of the small room. Her ribs were maybe broken now, her knee was on fire. What was happening? Why was it happening? Her body jerked as the thing fisted a hand in the bottom of her pajama pants and began dragging her towards the back of the tent. Her thoughts, hazy and covered with the film of fear, raced even as she flung her hands out to try and scrabble for purchase on the hard-packed floor. Once she went over the edge what little chance she had left would be gone, even she could tell that much. Her free leg lashed out and caught the tower of plastic boxes which swayed but didn't fall down, too heavily filled with all of the cumulative crap that made up her life.

The back flaps of the tent rustled and parted even father. Oh god it was going to throw her down the cliff face. She was going to die; she was going to die. She twisted aggressively mouth gaping in a silent scream as her knee buckled to dig her hands into the floor. If she could only stop it for a moment, break away and run outside. Someone would see even if they couldn't hear.

The thing did not stop, did not stumble, frankly it didn't seem to notice she was doing anything at all. She slid inexorably towards the edge fingers catching and pulling on the dirt leaving jagged runs in behind her. The first fingernail ripped away from the index finger on her right hand, then two from the left. Her legs breached the edge leaving her, for one frantic second of panic, suspended in the cold air, and then she plunged over the edge - leaving nothing behind but a few fingernails, a disheveled room, and a small smattering of blood.

The kidnapping would have been infinitely more comfortable if she had been able to play it off like a very bad dream, if maybe she had been drugged or beaten into unconsciousness the way she felt she probably should have been. Unfortunately, as with many things in her life this particular bit didn't go her way from the beginning, so the middle bits were just as bad as the beginning ones.

Whatever had snatched her was in no way gentlemanly about removing her from the slum. By scaling the cliff wall that comprised one of the sides of the encampment it had been able to completely bypass the few security measures both Mizuko and the slum dwellers in general had set up. An oversight really; but no one had thought that climbing a sheer rock face made up of rubble would be anyone's first, second, or even third choice to get into a relatively unprotected section of town.

If Muzuko had been in a better state of mind she might have wondered what exactly had prompted the situation she found herself in. Although she was by no means the most popular person in town, she also was neither famous nor infamous. Despite the sharp population decline over the last decade City Z was still ranked in as one of the top ten most populated Urban Centers in the district. With over three million registered citizens and somewhere between a half a million or a million undocumented. The odds of Mizuko Watanabe being kidnapped in the dead of night by an unknown assailant were so low as to be laughable. And yet, here we all are. D

The rain continued unabated as the, monster presumably, dropped heavily onto the ground at the bottom of the cliff. Mizuko, incensed and in tremendous pain but still very much awake, was unceremoniously dumped out onto the ground and then folded into a heavy went blanket that smelled overwhelmingly of animal, wet animal. They kidnapper seemed to have left it in a heap at the bottom when he started climbing and it had been raining nonstop for hours. It was an honest concern she might die of drowning rather than suffocation. The drop to the ground had left her briefly stunned and unable to do more than roll onto her stomach and stretch her arms out before she was bundled back up again. Mizuko had to applaud whoever was planning this out, although the outcome was less than favorable for her they were moving along swimmingly. Nothing about a silently screaming wreck of a woman floating in midair screamed "willing" or "appropriate", but a smelly silent blanket presumably being carried by a no longer invisible something was probably just vaguely unusual.

Time seemed elusive within the tight roll of the blanket, with no way to orient herself or tell how long they had been walking. The panic attack was not unexpected but when it hit it was overwhelming. Breathing felt impossible, her arms twisted down tight against her torso, each lungful dragged in with the tang of mold, a little too short and unfulfilling to clear her head. She felt her face heat the anxiety buzzing beneath her skin, sandpaper on open nerves. She opened her eyes only to squeeze them shut again them against the blank darkness. Her breaths went from deep nasal pulls to open mouth panting; saliva pooling at the corners of her mouth. Fear drooling, she'd never wanted to add that to her list of experiences but here she was, fear drooling and hoping in a very distant corner of her mind that she didn't piss herself. If she managed anything else tonight, she sincerely hoped she could keep from peeing all over herself. She wanted at least a little dignity left, just a little please. She was losing moments, shocks of fear pulling her mind off the tracks and sending it tumbling. It would be a joke to say it felt like an eternity (it felt more like a lifetime). Never in all her years had she felt more hopeless, more alone, or more terrified.

The walking was steady and even, whatever was carrying her was having little to no issue carting her around. The sensation of movement seesawed occasionally up and then down again, with long almost motionless moments stretched between them. Mizuko lie limp inside of her cage, unashamed of the tears dripping down her face. This felt like death, this long walk. Or maybe it was a descent into the underworld, if you wanted to get J. S. Campbell on the situation as a way of making this more palatable. After all in the hero's journey generally you got out of the underworld alive-ish (you know if you weren't a subversion of the trope in which case gg no re).

The second drop, when it came, filled her with a rush of heady relief even as her body snapped smart reports of pain at the rough treatment. Finally, it was over. Well this part of it anyway. Considering the way things were going right now Mizuko wasn't holding out too much hope that things would get better. Managing Expectations, that's what she would call it. Managing. Expectations. The damp carpet around her lurched suddenly sending her tumbling side over side until the fabric completely unrolled leaving her shivering and witless on a dirt floor.

"Oh, good job buddy!" a voice cried with delight, "got her real fast!" Mizuko shivered and tried to roll onto her stomach. Her limbs jerked and spasmed painfully, her left hand hurt, her knee was wretched.
"I want my bonus." A smooth voice interrupted, "I got her in under twelve hours and no one saw me. I do good work, I do it quick, now don't make me wait." Mizuko tried not to look, she really did, but the thing that had taken her wasn't exactly hard to miss and with none of her limbs co-operating she couldn't even think of getting away. The thing, the person once upon a time, was huge easily standing over seven feet tall with pearlescent skin a shade or so darker than heather grey. Its body was humanoid in proportion (two arms, two legs) deviating most severely around its head where a huge wolf like skull leered and at the legs; digitigrade with huge paw-shaped feet. She could imagine being able to be both invisible and preternaturally silent suited it, nothing that looked like that would be walking around in the light of day without a Hero license pinned to their chest

"Yea yea buddy she's alive too which is a real winner." The first voice continued at the wolf-monster settled back on their haunches, "We was kinda worried with your reputation we'd get back a gnawed chew toy n'not a livin' person. So good job! Now get out and you'll get ya money at the door. Scram!"

She shook her head side to side as she tried to regain her wits, she might have imagined it but she thought the wolf-monster shot her a sympathetic look as it rose and collected the rug they had transported her with. Or it was constipated. It was probably a shitty idea to read emotions into an anthropomorphic wolf man face, it only ever showed you what you wanted to see.

"Ah ah ah Anagawa." The first voice crowed as the wolf monster quit the room, presumably leaving the same way he had brought her inside. "Anagawa look who we have here." Mizuko turned her head and shuddered as her new captor slunk into the light. The monster, not Anagawa but the one calling for them, was lanky and loose limbed - small where the wolf man had been huge. Although relative size was hard to guess when lying flat on your back Mizuko would have hazarded that standing tall the monster would be of a relatively even height to her. Five or maybe five and a half feet tall on the outer stretch, with the last few inches comprised of the snacking pile of tentacles the monster had piled atop his head much the way a human might style their hair.

"Well little lady." The monster said ambling up to her and crouching down over her, "isn't this going to be fun."

He leered and Mizuko wanted to vomit. The monster's teeth were sharp and yellowed with age or decay, the mass of tentacles on his head swayed back and forth in the low light almost hypnotically. This close she could see tiny gaping mouths at the end of each follicle, angry little things filled with rows of tiny needlelike teeth to match the monster's smile. The less that was said about his breath, the better for both reader and character alike- it was, not good.

"I am Mie." the monster said with a quixotic little half bow over her prone form, and then paused as if waiting for her to say something. They started at each other for a few breaths in silence before Mie rocked back on his heels. He was by far one of the most human-like monsters she'd seen yet. If it wasn't for the sickly pallor of his skin (almost translucent even in the muddy overhead light) and the tentacles that had replaced his hair he looked nearly like anyone else. If his fingertips ended in knifelike claws and his breath reeked of blood well those were things he could cover up (probably).

"Anagawa!" Mie snapped looking over her prone body to somewhere in the distance behind her. "Today please, prisoners don't just torture themselves don't you know!"

Mizuko felt tears trickle down the corners of her eyes.

"Why?" she managed to croak. "Why?"

A shadow loomed from her right side huge and undefinable the slither hiss of scale against earth. She sucked in huge gulping breaths turning her face away and into the hardpacked dirt at her cheek as if by refusing to look she could refuse the thing in the corner's right to manifest itself. Mie was wearing sandals, his toes looked normal. Why did his toes look normal? She felt her heart seize and turn, as a smothering veil of fear settled over her. Mie grinned down at her reaching out a to touch the sharp edge of a claw against the corner of her eye socket, a tiny pinprick of pain against the otherworldly onslaught of fear that was settling deep in her gut.

"Saitama." Mie said as something smooth and scaled brushed against the back of her shin. She shuddered out a heaving breath, "You're here because of Saitama. So, why don't you tell us all about him, hm?"

Psychological torture, Anagawa had always thought, was probably way harder to pull off than run of the mill physical torture. You had to do a lot more planning for one and also it just took a really long time. Like a really long time.

Like right now for example; they had girl-snatched Saitama's woman ages ago and he'd been locked in this room with her for days and all she'd done is cry and throw up. Well and have a few small seizures, he'd had to stuff a bit of shirt into her mouth to keep her from biting her own tongue off after the first one. That had taken some doing, she'd clamped her jaw shut like a vice a few hours in and refused to open up unless he physically pried them open which was very disgusting. He wondered if he'd produced that much sticky mouth juice when he was still human. He really hoped not.

Honestly, he wasn't really a fan of torturing people, but hey it was what he was good at. Anagawa could have been someone really great if he had wanted to. The Monster Association had once had very high hopes for him when he had first been 'found'. Anagawa, you see, had a Talent for driving people insane simply by being in the same room as them. He was a little medusa and a lot walking Lovecraftian horror; the hope had been that he would prove to be the associations premier torturer. Humans were particularly susceptible often suffering hallucinations and full body paroxysms within minutes of being placed within eyesight of the monster; his mere presence carried a metaphysical malaise with him that incited depression and anxiety in those nearby. The MA had been ecstatic about his very existence right up until they had realized that Anagawa lacked the one requirement for anyone hoping to get ahead in life; any sense of ambition or interest in what he was doing.

Whatever had prompted Anagawa to mutate into a monster, and stripped most of his human memories away in the process, had also made him incredibly lazy and easily susceptible to boredom. The first time he had tried to torture someone for his new bosses he had given up fifteen minutes in because he was 'honestly just really bored'. The second time he had gotten really wrapped up in asking them about their opinion on the newest Game of Homes episode from the night before (He though Lord Taris was going to be the Divine King but was open to alternative theories if the evidence made sense) and completely missed the guy dying of a heart attack for three hours he was so intent on theory crafting the next season. They had labeled him mostly useless for actual interrogation after than one and within a few weeks he had been assigned Mie as a handler and been shunted off to an area where he was easily accessible if you needed him to terrorize someone into incontinence simply by existing- while also not getting in the way of anyone who actually mattered.

Anagawa was content with the setup. Mie, while demanding and insane, was also completely harmless to Anagawa on the grander scale. Mie had plans, Anagawa tried to help where he could, they failed, and a new gaggle of monsters no one cared about died. It was a cycle as regular as the seasons and around as interesting. Really, he was just grateful it didn't interrupt his prime-time television binging.

Angawa crunched on another handful of Meerios(tm) as he stared unblinkingly down at the girl's body (His eyelids were optional! It was fun!). She was wedged into the right-most corner of the cell today face turned into the wall. Intermittent shivers chattered up and down her body but she remained eerily silent. The screaming had ended a few hours before this and he had to hand it to her that she'd intuitively figured out that not having a line of sight to him made the hallucinations a little more bearable. He'd never spent too much time experimenting with his Talent, it was too much effort in his opinion, but he knew that direct eye contact was probably the most powerful and effective way of using his abilities; but since his simple presence alone was generally effective enough, he wasn't too concerned.

What was concerning him was that Mie had disappeared somewhere, again. This whole torture thing wasn't going to work if Mie wasn't here to ask any questions. Anagawa was not the question guy, he was the torture guy. The whole point of this thing had been to get answers out of her about Caped Baldy and she wasn't talking in general. Mie had given some really insane speech filled with ranting and threats of violence but by the time he actually got around to asking anything specific she was already deep in the hallucinations, unable to do much other than scream. Anagawa had assumed Mie would tell him to leave eventually so she could recover some of her wits and then interrogate her, but the other monster had stomped off some time ago and just never returned.

In the corner the girl jerked and shivered as Anagawa crunched away on his remaining Meerios. He was dismally low on snacks and rapidly losing interest in the situation. If Mie wasn't back soon, he was just going to give up and go back to watching Golden Fries re-runs on channel seven.

Mizuko wished, very fervently, that she was dead.

If time had been like water slipping through her cupped hands the night she had been taken now it was basically non-existent. Something deep within her had been wounded, something she wasn't sure she was ever going to be able to recover.

Probably my sanity She thought to herself with amusement, gently tapping her forehead against the wall Yea for sure my sanity. The wall was at least probably real, she'd determined that early on. The wall and the floor were probably real, and the thing in the corner that SHE WAS NOT LOOKING AT was also real, very real. The thing in the corner didn't generally make much noise, but it didn't need to. The wall had been her friend for a while, she hit her head against it sometimes like this. The gentle tap through her skull was a small reminder her physical body existed (probably!) somewhere outside of what was happening to her. She reached a hand towards her face (snotty, gross, red-eyed, maybe also not real!) and swiped at the mess there, her nose had stopped running in the last few minutes, that was new.

She brought her hand away from her face rubbing her index and forefingers together squishing blood and snot together between them like a nasty stress ball. She snickered and shook her fingers off, wiping them against the dirt floor. What a gross thing to do, she warbled out a chuckle. She wondered if the CORNER THING would react this time, it always seemed to get weirded out when she had a bodily function. Once she thinks it maybe sympathy vomited when she started pissing herself the first time, which had been a real breaking point for her psyche (re: how much humiliation she could take before she just gave up caring about it. Man, wasn't it just hilarious when she begged NOT to pee herself, HAH! The gall, the unmitigated GALL she had, like she would have a choice). Honestly it was hard to tell anything in-between the THING WE DON'T THINK ABOUT and THE OTHER THINGS WE ARE ALSO NOT THINKING ABOUT. Again, she and Time were kind of broken up right now and like most ex-girlfriends Time was not giving her any feedback about what was going on. She could have peed herself six years ago or six minutes ago for all she knew. It was kind of pointless to worry anyway, it didn't really matter. She pressed her face back into the corner of the wall and waited. Cool air whispered through the crack under the door and she fidgeted, shifting from one knee to the other; it was probably only out to get more food.

Nothing was happening.

Now in the grand scheme of things nothing happening was really not that big of a deal. Things didn't happen literally all the time. What was unusual about this 'nothing happening' situation is that it was currently happening to her. Her who had just spent an indeterminate amount of time having things very much happening to her.

The cell was as quiet as a whisper.

She considered her options for a moment. If this was a trick it was a new and inventive one. Wither it was or not wasn't the real question, the question really was 'would she be willing to fall for this one if it was a trap'. Things came and went in waves, they got intense and then waxed back down but they never actually stopped.

She remained crouched for another eon, ears alert for any slither or scrape of scales behind her. She wasn't sure how long she waited, hard to tell with no light or sense of time, before the courage came back to her in a rush. Suddenly her mind was made up, like a conclusion had already been waiting for her to screw up the courage to take it up, and she was ready to fall for whatever trick the monsters were pulling. Better to know than to wait, if it was a trick it wouldn't matter either way and if it wasn't? If It wasn't-

Reaching out she placed her hands palms flat against the wall and slowly began to stand. Her legs felt weak and ill-used (which they were) and her head swam alarmingly. It was laborious, standing, but with the wall to support her weight she managed to gain her feet again. Her knee hurt.

She looked down and had to steady herself against the wall as her leg refused to hold the full weight of her body. The small room wasn't really lit per say, motes of light drifted in from the cracks under and above the cell door, but it was bright enough for her to see the mess that was her lower body. She was covered in – her though process screeched to a halt and she just took a moment to breath herself through the frayed edge of the panic attack her body was valiantly attempting to have. It might as well not have tried; she didn't have enough adrenaline left to really get a good one going. To say she felt ridden hard and put up wet would be inaccurate only in that the phrase was generally used for after a good dicking, and while she did feel fucked, she didn't feel FUCKED (you know).

Her knee was a nearly blue black color, distended and hot to the touch but a few timid attempts to settle her weight on it proved that while it was unsteady and absolutely a bad idea to walk on it, it still worked. She let out a gusty sigh and leaned into the wall, smooshing her face against the cool hardpacked dirt.

Now or never.

She didn't give herself time to think it over.

She turned on the ball of her good foot and swayed vision graying around the edges, moving too quickly wasn't such a great idea apparently.

The room was empty.

Her eyes darted to the door and back into the corner where THE THING had always been.

Nothing looked back at her.

She eyed the door again.

Nothing happened

"What?" she croaked aloud, wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue. "What the hell..."