For those of of you reading this, I love that you took time out of your day to read it. Thanks!
I sat in the small hallway, trapped between the blue and green doors. I couldn't open the green door, and on the other side of the blue door was a forest full of some form of surely violent alien life. The situation couldn't possibly get worse.
A sound from the blue door proved me wrong.
I heard a loud whump from that direction, and turned to see the door beginning to slide open. They had figured out how to open doors?! I watched in horror as the green bird-lizards stood just outside the door, all of them tilting their heads quizzically. Now that they were much closer, I could get a better look at them. Their slender green bodies stretched roughly six feet from the tip of their baked noses to the end of their scaly tails. Their long, thin forearms ended at a five clawed hand, each claw extending several inches. When one of them opened its mouth to screech at me, I saw row after row of small but sharp teeth. I stood up and hurriedly backed against the green door, trying to put as much distance as I could between me and them. One of them, with a streak of blue running down its beak, cautiously made his way into the room, quickly followed by the others. There was nowhere to run; my only hope was to either fight them or run past them back into the forest, and with no chance of the latter happening, I steadied myself for a fight that could probably be the end of me.
The blue streaked one stopped approaching. It tilted it's head again, then made a screeching, almost whistling cry. The other four repeated the process, and hopped from one foot to the other nervously. The one nearest the door seemed especially nervous, but before I could realize what was happening, I felt the door behind me click as it unlocked. Not stopping for even a second to consider why, I turned and threw myself through it. I slammed into a man in a white lab coat, who was holding a battered looking clipboard and a bucket of what smelled like fish. His bewildered gaze fell on me, and he started to cry out in alarm, but before he could I drove my knee into his abdomen, grabbed him, and threw him into the hallway I had just exited. The door slid shut as he picked himself off the ground, the bird-lizards staring at him with much the same look they'd given me a moment before. As the door clicked shut, I saw the blue streaked one lunge forwards, stabbing its clawed fingers into the man, and I heard his screams echo. A few moments later, everything was once again silent.
I quickly took inventory of took inventory of the room I now found myself in. It looked like a lab, full of display cases with dead organisms floating in a blue liquid. The tables around the lab were covered in papers and notes haphazardly tossed about, and the walls were covered in even more notes raped and tacked up, and behind those, even more notes. A single door stood at the other end of the room, but unlike the doors I'd seen thus far, did not glow with any colour. It looked like it had been powered down, and the nearby console was once again in that unfamiliar language. I repeated the character sequence from when I had freed Sal, but it did no good.
Deciding that the notes stuck everywhere were as good a shot as any on shedding light on the door, I turned my attentions to them instead. The task soon began to feel hopeless as I went through pile after pile of notes, but all I found were notes on the biodome at the other end of the hallway. I learned that the bird-lizards from before were called Burēdotatchi, and apparently they were the apex predator of their home world Weebilia. Still, nothing I needed.
Finally, after three or four hours of searching, I found what I was looking for. A small note on the back of a clipboard showed the words Door Activation Code, followed by 33 different characters in a sequence. Rushing to the door, I punched the information into the console as quickly as I could. The sound of whirring machinery greeted me, and I waited patiently for the door to open.
Finally, the door began to glow a faint blue, and I stepped through into another long hallway, which curved and rose at a sharp angle. I walked cautiously down the hallway, hoping that no other deadly creatures awaited me. As I neared the end, I came into a large room made entirely out of some transparent substance, and found myself perched over the biodome. I could see the entirety of the massive room, and far below I could make out the green flashes of the Burēdotatchi as they hunted their next prey. I could also see creatures that closely resembled monkeys, but with a hand on the end of their tails.
A shadow passed over me, and I looked up. The roof of the biodome continued on for quite a while, and in the sky I saw something that sent a shiver down my spine. A group of what I had assumed to be birds from the ground, flying in unison. They were a deep purple, with fiery red eyes that were thankfully unaware of my prescence, and a scaly hide that could undoubtedly take more than a few hits from my arm cannon, even if I'd had my power suit.
They were space dragons.
The same as Ridley.
Hope you managed to get through that. The next chapter should be more exciting, hopefully.
CM out.