User:Lin/Pain and Chaos
| This story contains adult content. |
Slowly her consciousness rose from the velvet blackness. Everything about her body felt like a tank had just rolled over her repeatedly, only to balloon her with air a moment later. Every heartbeat was like a hammer strike resonating in her ears. Even the faint light that made its way through her eyelids tormented her, searing into her like white hot lasers. She attempted to move ever so slightly, but even thinking about it did made her muscles scream in agony.
What felt like an eternity later, the pains began to ebb and wane eventually. Not as fast as her tormented brain screamed for, but it was enough that her thoughts could go beyond begging for them to stop.. Who and where was she? And what had happened to her? But before she could finish the thought, she sank away into an unsteady slumber again.
The moments between each episode of consciousness and the next could have been mere minutes, or hours; she couldn’t tell. The pain she remembered from her first episode of half awakening dulled down to an endurable degree. But as she attempted to move, she felt the protest of the tortured muscles in her arms and stopped. Instead, she tried to open her eyes . With quite an expense of willpower she managed to coax the eyelid muscles to follow her commands, forcing them apart with all of her thoughts. At first, everything was dark, but then she noticed a naked gas-discharge tube mounted against a steel ceiling, but the ashy grey color of it told her that it burned out quite some time ago. To her left, she recognized the rough texture of epoxy laminated paper. Inhaling under some pain, she forced her neck muscles to obey, turning the head to her right in what seemed to be a stop motion film . This short movement alone seemed to rob her of all of her power, but she managed, spotting a door ajar that allowed some flickering light to pass through. It was the flickering light from another discharge tube with a defect starter. The last thing she realized from the corner of her eye, was the white foam she lay stretched out on before darkness took her again; the same foam they used to fill mattresses in hospitals.
Once again, she couldn’t tell how long she had been away, but this time the pain was gone entirely. She opened her eyes, just to squeeze them shut the instant after. More light than her eyes could manage flooded the room and even tormented her through the closed eyelids while the silence was broken by a deep and low hammering. It sounded like a fly’s wings would make, but slowed down to a mere fracture and then increased in volume to make a deep dub. As the bolt of pain ebbed away, she tried again to see something, extremely slowly and carefully this time. The whole room was in the dirty grey and white she had anticipated, and the white foam underneath her was spotted with stains in different shades of yellow and red. Just ahead of her was a window in the wall, and through it streamed a cone of light, the very one that had blinded her only moments ago. It wandered through the room, revealing the items that lay there astray: a small pile of cloths, a bunch of plastic wrappings, and a nightstand with a folder upon it. The room was in chaotic disarray and the harsh light made it look even shabbier. A few moments the cone of light remained on the bare wall of the room while she remained motionless upon her foam bedding. Then, the light was gone.
Slowly she pulled herself together and up from her resting place. Surprisingly, the dim, flickering light that came through the doorway was enough to her to make her notice details that shouldn’t be visible in so little illumination. The texture of the dry cement on the floor seemed to stand out, the mostly polished down welding seams of the roof, even the dark grey stripes in the black curtains. She didn’t remember ever having good night vision, but then again, she didn’t remember too much about her past, or rather she didn’t remember anything but that this was a new sensation. The room felt just wrong, as if she never had been here before, and with a shiver, she realized she couldn’t even remember her name, or what she looked like. Taking a deep breath she lowered her eyes, looking down her frame while lifting her arms. The bare skin of her hands came into view, painted into a silky orange from the light passing through the door. About half a dozen colorful patches dotted her wrists, and she began to peel them off one by one before taking a look at the rest of the body that felt alien but well known at the same time.
Letting her eyes wander upwards along her arms, she noticed that they seemed to be quite slender at first. As she moved the lean fingers to peel off those colorful adhesives, she felt the tendons and dense muscles twist and bunch under the skin that was free of blemish or hair. Making her digits obey also made the stiff joints in them ache slightly. As the first of the plastic plasters came free, she noticed a silvery glistening liquid sticking to it and winced a moment on the chemical, biting smell it had.
With each patch she peeled off, the inflexibility of her articulations lessened and the movements felt more natural and smooth, almost nimble. Finally, the last one came free and she tossed it upon the small pile that had formed on the floor, before she stretched her arms fully. Twisting the hands around to feel each and every one of the sore muscles in her lower arms and then bending the elbows to do the same for the upper ones, she heard a crack as her shoulder joints snapped into place. It was not the painful scrunch from a dislocated bone, but more the relieving sound of cartilages getting the movement they needed after a longer rest.
Taking in a deeper breath, she locked the fingers of her hands into each other and closed her eyes a moment as she lowered her chin and pulled her hands to the back of her head, pulling down while she pressed against the hands with her neck musculature. On her palms she could feel the texture of the matted hair, which was just an inch or two short of brushing against her shoulders, then the muscles of her nape tensed while she moved her skull to the upright position again. As she lifted the lids of her eyes again, she spotted her calves and feet in another of the red-orange flashes from the door, but besides them being well trained and bearing a thick layer of hard skin under them, they didn’t seem too remarkable to her at first. Only as she let her eyes rest upon the toes a moment or two, she realized, that her toenails seemed rather pointed, almost sharp and clawlike. Shuddering she averted her eyes, reasoning with herself that they were just scruffy and would look ordinary once they would undergo pedicure.
As she turned her head to gaze down her back, the black stripes of the tattoo virtually jumped upon her. The first line followed her shoulder blade, its shape tapered towards the arm and the color fading towards the inner of it and a few inches lower a similar waved line stretched towards her ala. The next lines were invisible to her as she could not turn the neck far enough back, but at the lower back, she spotted a pair of forking lines, each and every about a thumb’s width or more in the center of her spine. Turning the head to the other side, it appeared to her, that the pattern etched under her skin was mirrored, spanning her whole back in a symmetrical way. Eventually, she stood up, the rough skin on her feet touching the uneven cement floor. Two steps brought her over to the gaping door and she risked a peek through it. The room behind had white walls and down from the ceiling hung a pair of lamps, one of them creating the jitters as the starter made the neon in it flash up red in an unsteady cycle, the was only there as the rest of the cable which had held it up. Now, it lay shattered upon the odd metallic table that stood underneath. Roughly humanoid-shaped, it featured leather cuffs where wrists and ankles did belong to. Halfway hidden by the polished surface was a strange aperture with hundreds of cables and tubes that connected it to the bottom of the table. Only then she noticed the keyboard upon the steel surface between debris left by the crashing lamp.
On the other side of the room lay a toppled over creeper over something white, the contents spilled over the off-white ceramic tiles of the floor. Syringes and surgical instruments cluttered the floor between glass shards, and some of the metal objects stuck out of the dirty cloth that the cart was partly covering. As she carefully stepped between them to not harm her feet, her nose caught a sweetish smell and she had a strange feeling in her guts about what she was about to see. A shudder ran down her spine as she realized fully that the white object was the body of a human. The bald head of the man was turned in an unnatural way, his nose facing to his back and a trickle of red fluid ran down from his mouth and dried hours ago. Now that she was closer, a slightly sour and rancid smell mixed into the odor, creating a mixture that she almost instantly recognized as similar the stench of a steak left out of the fridge for a day. The corpse’s lab coat was soaked in dried, reddish-brown blood where it touched the ground and in his left he held the broken hilt of a plastic scalpel while his right forearm was amiss. Nauseated she turned and left the room in a hurry, feeling a sharp pain as she stepped into a glass shard.
Stepping back into the room she had woken up in, she did clamp her hand onto the doorframe as she tried to sort things out in her mind. Who was she? Why she was here and where was here? The harder she thought about it, the less she could find an answer, as if everything that had connected her to the life before she awakened had vanished. Only the tattoo remained, but it could certainly be that it was new too. She couldn’t tell. Eventually, her racing mind decided to follow a mere instinct; to leave this place. Just to grab everything which might be useful and then run.
Letting go of the doorframe, she stepped fully into the room, the red flickers casting the long shadows of her frame over the floor. Each step hurt slightly from the small glass shard in the ball of her foot. Only as she arrived at the pile of clothes she stopped, crouching down to take care of it. Carefully she peeled the piece of the broken lamp out of the wound, and instantly she was rewarded with lessened pain, but also a gush of blood. The metallic stench of it hung in the air and in an attempt to lessen the flow she bent down to try to lick the red fluid away. Slightly to her own surprise, she managed to twist her spine and leg enough to not only lick the blood away, but also to be able to suckle at the cut without discomfort. The salty and metallic taste filled her mouth, but it was almost alluring. Then the hard and sandy grains of silex dislodged from the gash, and in some kind of reflex she did spit them out.
As she pulled her gaze away from her foot, she caught a whiff of its smell. It was a strange sour odor that wafted upwards. Peculiar and mostly suppressed by the metallic smell of the blood from her foot, but she couldn’t say it was a rank aroma. Lowering the leg, her eyes followed the firm muscle of her calf to the shallow cavity on the inside of her knee as her hand followed on the outside at the same limb. Letting her fingers run over the kneecap, she caught the first deliberate look upon her naked thighs. Shapely they formed a gentle curve, hinting about the trained muscles underneath the skin and ending in a small dimple at the side of her hips. Her behind was, as she had seen from the look down her back, by far not perfect, better to be described as somewhat angular in her own opinion.
Resting her sore foot upon the ankle to keep the wound off the dirty ground, her left hand rested upon her knee, while her right hand found a comfortable position at her hip. Maybe they were not wide enough and a tad bony to be called nice and well-shaped, but at least they did flare out some in comparison to her waist. Sighing she lifted her eyes to take a look upon the room once again, but before she had found anything new, they returned to the resting point of her right hand, as if it was magnetic. As she looked upon the fingers with their almost well-manicured nails she felt they were quite a harsh contrast to those claws she had at her feet. Just a fraction of an inch away from their resting spot her eyes found a trimmed down bushel of hair, the color of them only describable as dark in the dim and reddish flashes of light from the other room. It could be anything between red and black, she thought a moment, taking it as a hint to her natural hair color. Auburn maybe, but for some reason, she thought a reddish-black would look good on her.
Staring at her lower body, she realized that she couldn’t have too much of a chest to speak of, as she didn’t see them bouncing into her field of vision from below. Letting her chin lower down against her collarbone to see more, she tried to gauge how much she really had, but found it pretty hard with nothing to compare against. So she did pull both her hands up, cupping around the mounds of her breasts and then squeezing the firm flesh. Hugging around a bit, she eventually found a position for her fingers to rest in a way that didn’t feel too weird, each of them slightly gapped to the next one and the pinky just at the lower brim of them. Still, she couldn’t tell how much that was exactly, but to her, they felt like a small handful, at the apex maybe a finger and a half, maybe two if she measured generous, away from her ribs.
Eventually, she changed her seating position into a kneeling one and started searching through the pile of clothing for something to wear...