A girl who looked to be in her teens was seated with three of her friends on stools around a square table. They were staring at a pile of soggy chicken from K*C and some very unappetizing Styrofoam cups with the distinct imagery of Colonel S**ders being run over by a truck.
“I should not have relied on you to bring lunch.” She blankly stared at the guy with messy hair, she thought that if his bangs grew a little more, he could fit right in as the protagonist of an off-brand anime.
“Hey, that’s on you. He said he’d treat us to chicken, not to rely on him for lunch.” Contrary to his words, the tall and slender boy swatted a fly from a saucer of gravy as he took a bite of the chicken.
Well, at least he had the foresight to pack rice.
“Can I have some rice?”
“No.”
“Pretty please?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Yes.”
The girl groaned, regretting her participation in such a fruitless exchange. She resigned, supposing that soggy chicken was better than no meal at all.
“Pasta?” A voice beside her questioned. She turned, looking towards August who was holding a container that indeed contained pasta.
Despite being friends with them for 2 years, he was the only one whose name she remembered. She did not know why, they just tended to not use names. The girl also had trouble getting names to stick in her head.
Not August though, not only was his original name so absurdly long that it was memorable instead of forgettable. Not to mention, she always heard it while passing by a certain hallway almost every day. She would have jokingly called their merry band ‘Four Idiots’ if it wasn’t for him not being an idiot.
“Pasta.” She resolutely nodded, bringing out an empty plastic container from her bag.
As she set it on the table, she knitted her eyebrows, visibly confused by a decision.
“Wait, how much can I take?”
“Oh, just take as much as you can spin on a single fork.” August spoke half-jokingly.
A devious smile crept up the girl’s face.
“Sure, one moment please.”
“Oh what the fuck, don’t tell me you have a comically large fork.” The bringer of soggy chicken interjected.
Her smile grew even larger as she proceeded to rummage through her bag. She found an object wrapped in tissue and gently removed it and threw it on the table. She brought out the dummy thick fork in all of its glory.
“Holy shit, she actually brought out a comically large fork.”
“Do you actually bring that around just to make that joke?” August raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised.
Feeling a bit bad, the girl didn’t take too much pasta, maybe just a little under half. She wasn’t THAT shameless.
“Nah, just a coincidence, a really good coincidence. Just had a practical for our Home Economics, had to bring this and a few other things.”
As she gleefully ransacked the tub full of pasta, her grip on her fork somehow slipped from her hands, crashing into the ground with the fistful of pasta.
“Oops! My fork!” As she said those words, a brilliant light engulfed the entirety of the lounge outside of the cafeteria.
Later that day, the mysterious disappearance of 15 souls: 12 students, 2 teachers and a security guard, was reported on the local news. Such an anomalous event would be the main topic of many investigations, conspiracies and legends become.
Or perhaps such a tall tale never existed, and was merely weaved up by an avid storyteller.
After all, the alleged families, friends and acquaintances of the ‘victims’ reported that they had all died in unrelated accidents weeks or even years before that.
RED
‘The fuck?!’ Was the first thought that came to the girl’s head after the incident.
She was just reaching for the fallen fork, and all of the sudden her eyes were blinded by a really bright light.
‘Was there a terrorist attack on the school and someone threw a flashbang at us or something?’ She questioned.
With no one to answer her but darkness, she had to console herself with a joke.
‘Nah that couldn’t be, there was a Catholic school right around the corner, they would have gone for that.’
Regardless, she did not think flashbangs caused prolonged blindness, nor a loss of the sense of touch. Neither would it have caused the nagging feeling that she had to break out of something.
She felt a soft, rubbery substance all over her body. Not recalling any hospital treatments that involved wrapping the patient in whatever this was, she assumed the situation to be absurd. Unless…
‘Oh no! Did I get into an accident and get picked up by some random witch doctor. I heard there were a lot of those roaming around the country, especially in the provinces. Given their odd pseudo-science, I did not put it below them to resort to such an exotic treatment. I just hoped I didn’t get out of this with any complications.’ Her thoughts went wild, doing various complicated gymnastics.
Granted, her last memory was completely disassociated with any accident, and she was certainly not within an area where she would be brought to a witch doctor. However, she guessed there were cases where people developed amnesia after a traumatic accident.
Though it was a bit odd for her to remember dropping the fork as her most recent memory, perhaps there was some symbolism there?
While she was going through all her thoughts, the girl eventually broke out of whatever was wrapped around her.
As she touched the cold stone floor, thoughts buried deep inside her were brought to the surface of her mind. Indeed, not only did the hard surface press against her entire body, she felt a lot more. She felt little vibrations on the ground and was strangely aware of some minute details of the ground beneath her.
She felt discomfort, and horror struck when she had the urge to stick out her tongue. She complied with the primal feeling, as if she had no choice.
She felt her mind spinning wildly, it wasn’t as if her senses were overloaded, in fact, it felt the same as ever. There was just… something new, something alien added to it. For the sake of her sanity, she categorized it as a part of her sense of taste.
'Yep, taste, I can taste things a lot better now. In fact better than I can see. For example, I could not see much because it was especially dark, but with my tongue I could totally detect the dozens of slithery things with me!’
Yes, slithery things. They certainly weren’t her kin.
She presumed that she was not inflicted by stupid; she knew that she was a slithery thing now, but she was decidedly still human in mind. She thought that was a snake given that she felt a little scaley, but decided that there may be other animals that slithered on the ground like this.
As she hissed one more time, She found that there were a couple of things nearby that tasted… dead? Although from the violent hissing sounds, she could tell that the newly-born children were already feasting on those more unfortunate…
Each other, too. She was really hungry, they were also probably hungry.
She slithered away from the deadly nest, twisting her body to avoid all the aggressive snakes. There was this empty feeling in wherever her stomach was but…
‘I value my poor little life too much…!’
‘Screw it, a lady’s gotta eat when she’s gotta eat!’
The girl-turned-into-slithery-thing’s mindset twisted as violently as her body.
She preferred not to use fantasy logic on real life situations, but it would really suck for her to find herself within a snake’s body without any benefits.
‘But usually, in these kinds of things, you had a system to help you!’
[Newborns cannot access their status. Only after a certain amount of time may they gain access, depending on race.
Remaining time for host: 3 days1Sorry, can't figure out tables]
‘FuuuuuuuuuuuucK! What kind of bullshit system are you?!’
She hissed, and found a relatively fresh corpse near the edge of a nest. Though she already sensed multiple snakes coming straight for it, she had to act without hesitation.
Unhinging her jaw, she swallowed the dead body whole, uncaring of any human modesty she had left. She continued to move despite the meal still sticking out of her. Her mobility was reduced and moving while digesting was obviously painful, but she had to trudge on, death was likely the other option.
She pressed on, and found herself by the side of a lake, near enough that she could see the water rippling through her inferior eyesight.
‘Dammit, don’t snakes have thermal vision or something? All I get is some crappier hardware.’
The girl slumped to the ground, her reptilian adrenaline fading away. There was so much she had to think about: her family, her old world(if she was in another one at all), the system. Her friends, they were with her then. Were they in similar situations?
It hurt her to even think.
‘I should just… rest and digest. Geez, it might take me a couple days to digest the, uh, food still dangling out of my mouth, at least I have the system then. Maybe it would give me a fighting chance; or rather it must give me a fighting chance.’
The water rippled, or rather, it was more appropriate to say that the water was violently displaced. It gave way to a force of nature, much, much more powerful.
The girl had assumed the body of water to be the side of an underground lake, but she was wrong. While she was right about being in a cave, it was on a cave near a larger body of water.
The ‘lake’ was the maw that opened into the abyssal depths of the ocean.
A massive orb greeted her vision, proceeded by a piercing howl.
[Due to the presence of a dangerous environment, the system has been activated prematurely for the survival of its host.]
The screeching noise of the howl repeated, this time somehow a little different.
She did not even have time to recognize the sudden message, as she had already stopped thinking in horror. The orb was an eye that belonged to a giant monster whose body dwarfed the entire lake’s surface.
Had she possessed some extra senses, she would have recognized that the howl contained a message for her.
‘Hmm, now that’s interesting. Wait. Fuck. Oops! I’m so sorry!’
ZAP!
The snake was no more.
Far away from that occurrence, both geographically and temporally, was a newborn fish sleeping. Inside of it laid the consciousness of a boy. The jet black flesh of the fish sizzled, letting out not steam but faint traces of magic. Soon, it would awaken and perhaps it will be the start of a more interesting journey.
make take me a couple days to digest
MAY take me a couple days=?
Fixed, thanks.