catte fic

standard nyc apartment for one

I heard from a mercenary that the Access Level 1 cells here look comfier than some hotels, and I'm not sure whether to be amused or horrified.

———

It wasn't like I could take them anyways. All four men (well, all three men and one woman) were armed to the teeth with gear. It honestly looked like they suited up with the intention of invading an island, not dealing with a loose Shork or the likes.
Why'd they give me a radio though? To mock me? We were god-knows-how-deep underground and it was impossible to catch a signal. It was Sisyphus' task, trying to find a station. Who is Sisyphus anyway? I only ever overheard his mission being used to describe something impossible.
Looking around the rest of the room, ignoring the radio on the shelf, I could spot some towels and blankets, a pillow, a few books, a black marker, and a container of noticeably soggy crackers. Crackers? More like benders.
The doorway lay in the bottom right of the room. I couldn't open it — it was locked. There was a speaker hung on the roof over the door. A state of disrepair was evident, wires on metal being visible in plain sight and the entire thing sagging down to just above the metal cell door.
So... Laminax had enough funding to break the goddamn laws of the universe but not enough to fix a speaker??
Damn.

One very rude awakening from my sleep later, I found out they used the radio as a makeshift speaker, of sorts. Which is impressive, but it also screams cheap. Strange.
Apparently, they were holding off on testing me and running me through their hell gauntlet or whatever because I was "strangely sophisticated". What a load of crock.
I mean, sure, I might be aware of what I'm doing and that I don't randomly attack staff and that maybe I tried to dismantle the radio earlier and...
...huh.
That was also precisely when one of the researchers came into the cell with a pen and clipboard. She pulled out a mobile phone and started a recording.
"14th May, 2023. Subject species A-2, Type 3."
She clicked the pen on the table and required it up to the page.
"Question 1. Do you understand human language?"
I nodded. There wasn't much else I could do.
"Subject answered affirmative via nodding." She wrote my answer down onto the paper.
"Question 2. Can you speak?"
I hasn't thought about that before. I didn't need to before this.
So I opened my mouth, and spoke.
Or, well, tried to.
What ended up coming out was a garbled meow with a smidge of butchered English. It sounded like one of those noises you would hear from the sealed demons of the underworld.
It also spooked the researcher, who looked just a bit alarmed.
And so we moved on to the next question.
My handwriting (pawwriting?) looked like a scribble. It was barely readable.
Basic math with those plastic circle bits was simple enough.
Which America were they referring to?
Soon enough, we had reached the end of the questions, and she stopped the recording. A few more lines were written onto the clipboard, presumably the final lines, and walked out the cell, the door closing behind her.
It wasn't much different than it was before, now.

Something dropped through a hatch in the wall. I went over to inspect it.
It was the lovely commodity of a slice of stale bread.
I inspected the flap of the hatch: it looked perfectly flush against the wall. There was no way to open it from my side.
Hmm.

Sleepness nights.
The tiled ceiling did nothing to quell my worries.
It reminded me of my cell.
...
...
I wonder how Dusk is doing. Would the mercenaries have found him yet?
She
Surely they've raided the crevice by now.
...
...
The door opened. It was the lady from earlier.
"Hey. I found some stuff you might've wanted."
Has she gone mad?
"I'm not supposed to do this. Don't tell anybody. If you manage to find a way to do so."
She handed me the two photos.
One was the polaroid Dawn and I had taken when we found the camera on the floor. He looked happy. I looked happy.
The second photo...
Clawed paws grasped the wood of the photo frame.
Dawn had asked me why I kept it. I said I found it lying near me when I had 'woken up'.
It was two people. Humans, both young. A woman, blue eyes. A man, green eyes. A glass shatter, splitting the two in half.
My green eyes stared back.

It's confirmed.
She's gone mad.
The researcher from yesterday came in with one of those books made to help children to learn how to speak. She was going to teach me how to speak.
"Alright, Orange! Try saying this out loud. 'buh'! 'buh'!"
This was torture. The hell gauntlet would have been better than this.

The two photos I received last night sat on the cold floor of the cells.
I never really looked at the second photo any closer before this. It was always just a decoration piece. But now...
There was something eerily familiar with that photo. I couldn't tell what it was.

...Maybe it's just me.

———

it's like i'm releasing my child into the world only to have it be run over by a semi 5 seconds after they walk out the door
i chose may 2023 for a particular reason involving a cooking utensil
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go check out Kaiju Paradise: Gootraxian Tales by GeneticGeneric over on ao3