Note: This has nothing to do with the other Alien stories I have written, as they were not very popular. This is also why the Xenomorph cannot see on its own. I stuck to canon.
[0000]
I could pinpoint no origin for the force that sucked me into the anomalous clothes drier. I hurtled through a void of white, sailing over a cluster of gigantic marble cubes, suspended by apparently nothing.
Although I lost my grip on the bear, it hovered behind me, perhaps lifted by the same unnatural force that kept the large purple cubes from falling. My vision remained intact.
My body crashed down on an island of marble cubes.
Groaning, I staggered to my feet, looking around.
The chiseled stairs, dais and pillars had the look of an abandoned temple. Beyond, on every side, more huge cubes floated in seemingly random arrangements, like some child god had been playing with their blocks and forgot to put them away.
I caught no scents in this strange place...a complete absence of smell.
Sound carried...differently, as if piped through a metal tube. The gurgling toilet noises had also increased in volume, to the point where I could almost distinguish voices and words through it. Almost.
Where was I? Why was the interior of this contraption vastly larger than its exterior? What suspended all these things above the void, and why did it still have gravity? Nobody present to answer these questions.
I glanced back. A huge gap lay between me and the drier tunnel. Even if I could somehow jump across, a powerful force kept pulling me in the opposite direction, like magnetism or the eye of a maelstrom, preventing me from returning the way I came. I would have to find another exit from this unnatural realm...if such an exit existed.
As I stood staring, the vacuum dragged at me again, and I slid down the length of the island.
The slick marble offered little traction, but I dug my claws in, skidding to a halt mere centimeters from the opposite end.
I slipped forward, came close to pitching over the side, into the void.
I jumped back.
Up ahead floated the apparent source of the disturbance, a flickering, shifting tornado-like ball of random debris, roughly the size of an automobile.
What was that thing? Bits of marble, from where the cubes had weathered, cracked and broken off, flew into the center of this mysterious object, but did nothing to disrupt the vacuum, or its constant whirling.
Red glowing orbs circled the object. Merely looking at them filled me with indescribable feelings of loathing, yet something about them I found hypnotic. I could hardly look away.
A gunshot cracked off my back. I spun around to discover that the soldier I'd thrown into the machine survived, weapons intact.
Growling, I rushed to destroy him before he could get in another shot.
The man seemed to be expecting this, and the constant pull of the whirling thing slowed my speed like I were underwater.
A metal canister came rolling my way., beeping and flashing orange warning lights. It exploded.
The force of the blast flung me into the air. No longer touching ground of any sort, my body flipped over the end of the island, then flipped again, right into the heart of the tornado ball.
[0000]
Item 9781401: Spherical Entropic Entity
Level: 5
Class: Keter
Description: A ball of entropic force. Object resists study due to volatile nature. Tornado-like features suck nearby objects in, throws others out with violent force. Human beings cannot go within 4.5 meters of object without being drawn in and diced like carrots in a blender. Those within safe range of entity report strong feelings of emotional hurt, and the sudden resurfacing of traumatic, painful memories.
Multiple instances of this object have been reported in various geographic locations. We theorize these objects to be aggregates of negative energy, somehow created by collective psychic trauma. For containment recommend explosives grade structural reinforcements.
[0000]
I did not die.
Upon first being pulled into this oddly shaped storm, I felt my body compressing, but I can "Bend like a reed." It helped to have an exoskeleton rather than crushable bones.
The whirling thing tore at my limbs like it intended to pull me asunder. Bits of debris pelted my body. The red spheres orbited, then passed through me like a burning hot laser.
With the spheres came feelings.
Anger.
A disembodied rage.
I had a momentary flash, a vision of a child cowering at the foot of a staircase, cowering as his father repeatedly struck him with his fists.
An adult, unleashing his full brutal attack strength on a small creature incapable of inflicting anything close to the same amount of damage...No justifiable explanation for the attack.
The child sobbed as his flesh bruised, tears flowing down his freckled cheeks. "Shut up or I'll really give you something to cry about," the man snarled.
Why why why why? The question seemed to accompany the red orbs, practically screaming it out as they burned through me.
A blonde woman, struck in the face by a bearded man in a tank top. She wept as her body crashed into a glass coffee table.
Why why why why why why why...the constant refrain hissed like static, morphed into a gurgling water cooler sound, took on the voices of the victims.
A boy in overalls clutching a stuffed dinosaur toy, staring in bewilderment at a bleeding gunshot wound in his chest. His eyes traveled to a trenchcoat clad teenager in the doorway of a kindergarten classroom, and the smoking semi-automatic in the teen's hands. The gore soaked dinosaur falls to the alphabet pattern carpeting.
Why why why why why why why...
The beaten child appeared again, now fully grown. He clenched his fists, pounding another small child senseless.
Why this abuse happened, what brought it on, I never got to see. I only understood the pain and the feeling of power radiating from the attacker.
This whirling entity...it appeared to consist entirely of disembodied abuse, removed from context.
Visions flashed of humans being pulled into this whirling entity, their minds sifted for responses to the never ending images of abuse. At some point, they always thought some form of abuse acceptable, especially revenge, due to their own tragic history of abuse. The whirlwind reacted by violently dismembering them.
And now the thing wanted me to feel as bad as all those people did, or worse, so it could gain power.
Birthed from a corpse, lacking a family, and raised in captivity, I had no emotional background to sustain the entity.
I attacked to kill, and only to eat, breed, or defend myself. It could not feed on my vengefulness. I sensed its frustration at my lack of understanding.
Every time the entity sent emotions of pain into my mind, I reacted with puzzlement, and with the detached "You humans don't make any sense!" It hated that!
I also possessed something no other victim had before: Awareness of my surroundings.
Although fighting the current, the bear still hovered outside the spheroid, showing me that my position had shifted. A little longer, and I'd be above one of those floating blocks, where I possibly could wiggle free without falling to my death...or whatever lay below in the void.
In addition to this, I discovered the whirling thing had vulnerabilities.
Although many parts remained insubstantial and transitory, something like a black hole kept drawing matter in, giving me solid targets, and a brace against the powerful core.
Better than that, the red orbs occasionally turned thick and spongy.
Grabbing a chunk of marble to shield myself, I rammed my claws into a glowing orb as it turned solid.
It exploded like a water balloon with a lit M-80 in its core. I gritted my teeth as waves of emotional pain and hurt washed over me. My brain filled with thousands of images, all mashed together, as if all the disembodied memories of abuse had crashed into each other and become a mist of aerosol liquid.
My stomach lurched. I thought I would vomit again.
The storm ball weakened in intensity. I glanced downward.
The block now lay directly below. If I were to escape this thing, it would have to be now or never, regardless of how horrible and disgusted exploding the orbs made me.
I lashed out with a shriek, ripping, biting and clawing at every red orb that came near. My attacks passed through some, but most exploded.
The cloud shrank more and more. Fortunately for me, the black hole at the center shrank too, allowing me enough space and resistance to finally break free from the object's pull.
Another explosion. I tumbled through air.
I tried to aim my body toward the purple block below, the micro-tornado had taken me too far off course. I pitched headlong past it, into the void.
Odd thing about this void: You never knew which way was up.
After a few minutes of helpless shrieking into empty white space, my weight shifted, and more cubes appeared, tiny from my lofty vantage point. They gained in size as I descended from the upper air.
I crashed thunderously into the corner of a block, rolled and flipped down a staircase-like block arrangement, dropped into the void again.
I fell through a gap between two blocks, emerged in the `sky' once more.
Pow! A bone shattering crash landing, again on a corner, but this time one bearing scientific equipment. I demolished a computer monitor, knocked a metal storage case into the abyss.
I remained stationary.
Rubbing soreness out of...everything, I took in my current position: A research outpost on a stretch of eroded marble dust. A box of scientific notebooks. The smashed computer monitor connected to a hard drive and a dead battery. An open storage container smelled of rotten food, and held nothing but discarded plastic wrappers and empty water bottles.
A parabolic reflector stood defiantly on a tripod nearby, by some minor miracle unaffected by the suction of the whirling thing. Cables connected to radio equipment and a SAT-Phone, though, of course, it all had dead batteries.
What was all this doing here? I wondered. Who set it up, and why?
When I located a pup tent on a lower block, the answer became obvious.
Inside, on a tattered sleeping bag, lay a labcoated skeleton. The poor fellow had probably been sent in to study...something and could never get back out again.
Sadly, that also meant I could never get out again.