Chapter One
Location: Columbus, Ohio, United States
Within one of the many grocery shops in the city, a few several customers wandered about and carried on with their day. Some dragged trolleys with them to carry heavy loads, others walked on their own to either find one or two products or just look around for anything. Once such customer was an adult woman in her thirties with dark-brown eyes, slightly tanned skin, and short greyish-brunette hair, wearing a turquoise short-sleeved V-neck top with a white undershirt vest within and greyish-green trousers. Hanging onto her left shoulder was a long-strapped shoulder-bag of similar dull-green colour with a gold-heart-shaped button.
The woman in question picked up a few tins of the shelf with interest before she headed over on her way to one of the automated self-checkout cashiers. She then scanned the few items she picked up through the system, adding up the price, and placed them aside before she pulled out her card from her shoulder-bag. The woman casually scanned her card on the cashier, expecting to pay forward as normal, only to be met by a low bleep and the screen reading 'DECLINED'. She scanned in her card again, only to hear that same bleep again and see that same one-word message again. A third time and a fourth time over, the same result. The woman glanced at her own card then at the self-checkout monitor, staring with utter confusion before growling and kicking the system out of mere frustration.
Just then, a faint yet sudden rumble could be felt across the floor, soon to be followed by a distant yet ear-splitting boom. Most of the people felt such an impact almost immediately, including the woman herself. Overtaken by curiosity, the woman especially walked her way back outside the shop, looking around to see where or what such a noise was coming from, only to find nothing much in clear sight, at first.
The woman turned behind her to see a dense fog of sickly-blue-green creeping up and enveloping over the supermarket. She barely even made a small step or two back before the fog soon overwhelmed her, incidentally breathed into her lungs. The woman coughed hard and fierce before she felt something off within her, something clenching her insides, something crawling under the skin of her shaken legs. Her shoulder-bag fell free and loose from her and to the ground without her even being aware of it.
The woman looked at her tingling arms, only to see greenish tendrils emerging and wrapping around her hands before coiling up her arms. Her eyes widened and her mouth gaped open with paralysing shock and horror before she felt a deep churning in her stomach. She then looked down at herself to see more tendrils emerging from her abdomen under her top and vest, then coiling down her trouser-clad hips and legs, wrapping them together and preventing her from escaping or even moving.
The tendrils around the woman's arms soon crawled over her short sleeves and the rest of her top as they enveloped around her chest and torso, eventually reaching up to her neck and head. She could only look upward and grind her teeth in desperation as her face was soon covered over as well completely. By then, the cocoon had fully sealed around her entirely.
To be continued...