Quiet Time

Chapter 2

     Emma was suddenly surrounded by a hazy darkness.

"What happened?" Emma thought to herself. "Oh yeah the gunshot I must be...," Emma thought but that didn't seem right to her. She could feel her arms and her legs, and could hear noises around her. "I'm just asleep, but that means," Emma began to force herself awake, remembering that she wasn't alone when she passed out.

     As she began to wake Emma noticed that she couldn't move her arms at all, they felt wrapped around her, and she could only move her legs a little, basically up and down, and with every small movement she tried she heard a chiming noise. Lastly she felt something in and wrapped around her mouth, the groans she was making as she was waking up confirmed that something was about halfway into her mouth keeping her lips opened and her tongue forced down.

      She struggled to open her eyes but finally managed to force them open. The first thing she noticed was her surroundings. The walls were painted to look like an outdoor park or pasture, with green grass on the bottom half and blue sky and clouds on the top half. It was a fairly large room, probably as big as her studio apartment, it needed the space though because of the rather large furniture housed within it.

     Emma currently had her back to the wall that the door was on. On her left hand side against that wall were two large cribs with smooth black wood and whitish pink sheets both had mobiles adorned with cute bugs and birds. They were next to each other end to end, so that one person's feet would be closest to the others head. The bars of the crib extended much farther than a normal crib, and both were fairly larger than your typical crib too, they looked like they had full size mattresses. If Emma stood on the mattress of the crib the bars would come up to her chin, almost going to the ceiling as the bed itself was elevated about two or three feet off of the ground. The side facing out to the room was hinged, and opened out to allow entry, and locked shut to keep the occupant inside.

     On the opposite wall to the cribs were two changing tables, arranged parallel to the cribs. They sat pretty high off of the ground and, they had a smaller raised base where the person doing the changing would stand. They were a soft white, and Emma could make out wrist, ankle, and chest restraints on both of the tables as well as a cabinet and a set of two drawers. The cabinet took up the front third of the space under where the person being changed would lay, followed by an empty section, and then the last third was taken by the drawers. Given what the table was Emma reasonably assumed the drawers and cabinets were filled with diapers and changing supplies.

     Directly across the room from Emma, on the wall opposite the wall with the door was a play area. It had a large rocking horse, and a large wooden, but plain toy box, with several stuffed animals and other plush toys and rattles strewn about on a softer play mat. Emma recognized the puzzle piece style mat from her preschool days, and it was a kind of mat she saw everywhere.

     Emma was currently on the back wall of the room, the same wall with the door. She was inside a large play pen. It was a light green pen, with green bars on each of the corners and soft white mesh connecting them. The floor of the pen was a soft white pillow-like material. The material reminded Emma of the walls of a padded room at a mental institution, or the mental institutions she saw in movies. There were also some smaller toys and a pacifier inside the pen with her. The walls were high enough the Emma couldn't climb out easily on her own, it rose to her neck if she stood. Similar to the crib one side was actually hinged, one of the green posts split in half to allow one side to fall limp and let the occupant in and out.