The dull red haze that was April's consciousness slowly solidified from an ache at the back of her mind into a throbbing pain at its forefront, her brain struggling to pull itself into focus. As she propped herself up on her elbows, swallowing a mouthful of bile, she wasn't sure if she had actually passed out, or whether the successive rounds of shock, head trauma, and further shock had temporarily pushed her into a fugue state. Maybe her mind just didn't know how to handle this cadence of consecutive unreality, and so had shunted her normal thought processes aside for a while as it struggled figured out what could possibly be happening to her.
If so, then it wasn't faring too well.
She was lying in what looked like a long tunnel constructed out of wrapped canvas drapery. The walls were hung with black fabric, like somebody had ribbed enormous curtains to create a tube five metres across that a person could walk through. The dim space should have been a pitch black to match the material of the walls, but once again she could make out a soft red light diffusing through the fabric, seeming to wax subtly brighter as her eyes adjusted. April wasn't sure whether the red shade was a colour of the light itself, or whether the translucency of the black fabric was imparting it.
She pushed herself to her knees and stood, holding one hand up against her throbbing head. The dark fabric flexed softly beneath her feet, and she was reminded of standing on a heavily festooned mattress, or perhaps the floor of a bouncy castle. Either way, it held her weight. The macabre material bunched and rippled away from her as she shifted her footing, the soft motion propagating up into the symmetrical walls, rustling through them as the wave of movement decayed away. She gazed down the length of the tunnel; the sixfold symmetry of strung material spiralled lazily away into the distance, taut vertices of the hexagonal cross-section twisting around as the space receded.
April walked over to one of the tunnel walls, gingerly planting her feet so as to keep her balance on the flexing ground. She reached out to touch one of the tunnel walls, softly brushing against the surface, and rubbing the cloth material between her thumb and forefinger. It was a soft black velvet, she realised, cross-stitched with a roughly grid-shaped quilting pattern, against a tougher cloth backing material. Occasional tears and holes interspersed the inner velvet lining at frequent, if irregular, intervals.
April stepped back. "Hello?!" she shouted, at nobody in particular. She had half expected the sound to echo out down the length of the receding tunnel, but the soft walls seemed to absorb the sound extremely well.
She tried again, regardless. "HELLO?! IS ANYONE THERE?!" She waited a moment for a response that did not come, before continuing, "AM I INSIDE OF A FUCKING HANDBAG?!?"
The only response was a soft, susurrating breeze as the walls of what might have been the interior of Trace's ugly handbag rippled, gently.
"Fucking... what..." April muttered to herself incredulously, reluctantly giving up on the idea of attracting the attention of anyone who might have been able to pull her out of this bizarre dream, or nightmare, or hallucination.
"I wonder if that guy knocked me unconscious," she thought to herself, and then, remembering Charlie's sickeningly bifurcated skull, "I wonder if I ever even woke up after the crash?"
Had everything that had happened to her that day been a dream? That still wouldn't explain seeing the monkey, but then that felt like the least of her current worries.
For a moment, her mind settled again on the image of Charlie in the bar, turning the image over, his head splayed open along that perfectly even, perfectly flat plane, bearing its internals for all to see. At the memory of the pulsing arteries, the glistening wetness of his blood, she felt her stomach rise in her throat, but was able to wrestle it back under control with a somewhat surprising ease. It was as if the way that the clean slice of nothing that had intersected Charlie's skull had kept the blood contained had neutered her usual anxiety. She felt like it was difficult for blood to contaminate when walled off behind an invisible barrier pressed against the exposed flesh. Like viewing a dangerous predator from behind the glass of a zoo enclosure.
She shook her head violently, trying to clear it of the unpleasant imagery. "I will pick that apart later," she resolved, "once I am out of here."
She walked over to the wall again, and placed her hand against the soft surface, running it along the material. She took a few steps forward down the tunnel, too, testing gingerly to check that the billowy fabric of the floor below her remained stable.
It held, and so she began walking. She kept one hand to the wall fabric, tracing her fingertips along it while being careful to avoid her nails catching on any of the small tears in the surface.
The red light maintained a steady background glow as she walked. The tunnel was utterly silent outside except for the occasional soft whispering rustle of the moving fabric. In fact, for several minutes she was concerned that nothing would change at all, and that she might be trapped here, walking forever on into infinity. The tunnel certainly stretched long enough in front of her that it wasn't an unthinkable prospect. But...
After five minutes or so she realised that the path she was walking down was not in fact entirely uniform. Its gradient had begun to pitch slightly downwards, snaking its way down through whatever larger void the canvas tube was presumably strung through. As it steepened—April stepping carefully now to feel out the spots in the fabric under her feet where it was loose enough to conform to their shape and provide support—the twisting maw began to constrict along with it. After fifteen minutes of gingerly tip-toeing forward in the dim red half-light, the five-metre diameter had shrunk to something closer to two, such that April could reach upwards and brush her fingertips along the ceiling of the tunnel where the fabric sagged down.
The narrowing tunnel and eerie silence sparked in April a growing claustrophobia, as well as an unpleasant sensation that she might be travelling down the digestive tract of some vast, unmoving fabric creature. Doing her best to turn her mind away from Godzilla-scale Muppet entrails, she forced her attention towards the process of descending down the passage, one footstep after another.
Another five minutes of walking rewarded her effort; the tunnel seemed to level out. Moreover, the quality of the dim red light seeping through the walls seemed to be getting slightly clearer, too. April wasn't sure if it was actually brightening, or... no, it seemed more like the layered fabric of the tunnel was getting thinner, and slightly less substantial. The small rips and tears in the inner lining were getting more frequent and increasing in size; through them she could see the thicker outer layer of material, but even this seemed to be thinning out.
As she stepped forwards into the growing red light, she became increasingly concerned about her footing. Sections of material had begun to tear underneath her as she placed her feet. Each time, a lower fold of the material caught her weight as the inner lining tore itself downward, but with the speed that the fabric as a whole was losing substance, she wasn't sure how long that luck would hold out. As one particularly long strand of frayed velvet tore itself off from the lower wall and floor, April felt herself jolt downwards a full foot before a roll of outer canvas stopped her from plummeting into the unseen, and even that stretched out under a worrying level of strain. The walls of the tube deformed around her as the lower section of the construction was pulled fully taut.
Reluctantly, given how long she had been moving in this direction, April halted her movement and began to carefully turn herself back around to head towards firmer ground. Bizarrely, though, and much to her consternation, the substance of the enclosing material seemed to continue to deteriorate behind her even after she had twisted fully around. In fact, looking closely now, she could see the material start to untwine itself as if of its own accord; woven fabric fraying apart along grid-pattern stretch marks.
April squeaked in shock as the band of supporting fabric beneath her, already pulled over-taut, suddenly tore. On instinct, she snapped an arm outwards to grab a handful of velvet that was hanging loose from the tunnel wall, only for that to tear away too, the fabric fraying away to nothing as soon as it was asked to bear her weight. Abruptly devoid of all support, her foot punched through the material beneath her, followed rapidly by the rest of her body as the webbing of threads diminished into a loose cobweb netting that snapped under her touch.
As the twisting canvas tunnel fell out of view, April had the brief impression of being suspended in a motionless free-fall, thick breathless air pressing in to sap the descent of any feeling of dynamism, even though she was clearly plummeting downwards. As she spun about in the air, her eyes were unable to fix on anything specific in her surroundings. She got the impression of a wide open space consisting of a uniform soft red fuzziness, like she was suspended in a thick, ashen mist that had fallen upon the world in the wake of a volcanic eruption. She hung in that stillness for a good thirty seconds, long enough to conclude that, assuming terminal velocity still worked the way she remembered, this would probably be the end of the line upon impact.
When she finally did hit something, she was pleasantly surprised to discover that it didn't kill her upon impact, but unhappy to discover that it most definitely did hurt.
What she landed on was not more strung fabric, but rather something fibrous that snapped under her weight. A tangled branch-like mass six inches across broke in half, but not before delivering a hard smack to her hip and already-injured shin, making her cry out in renewed pain, despite the still-active numbing agent.
Tumbling forward, she fell again, but was caught after a moment by another outshoot of the fibrous fronds, this time landing in the crook of two crossed strands. They failed to break under her reduced velocity, so the crook acted as a pivot that sent her tipping over backwards and into increasingly dense thickets of the material, her body gradually tumbling to the ground through a combination of breaking fronds and crashing falls.
Eventually, she came to a rest on a flat, oddly smooth surface, and lay there for a moment or two, curling in on the new pained bruising that covered her body where she had been impacted. Lying on her side, for a while she was unwilling to do anything but keep still. Ultimately though the pain began to recede and she found that, despite everything, she didn't actually seem to have broken anything. The past few days have been an incredible run of luck when it comes to avoiding serious injury, huh. She groaned, and gradually relaxed her body, unclenching her limbs.
By this point, the messages of her other senses were starting to intrude upon her consciousness, and, despite herself, her hindbrain was lighting up with panicked messages that she was now in an unknown environment, filled with potential hidden dangers.
The surrounding space was no longer quiet, either; she could hear a soft background ambience of popping, clicking and croaking sounds. It was half-analogous to what one might hear in a forest at night, except that none of the sounds she was hearing could be mapped to any sort of wildlife that she had ever heard of. Opening her eyes fully and looking around, she was greeted by a sight that continued that trend, a scene of startling, eerie familiarity that only served to further highlighted the alienness of its context.
She was in a forest, but rather than being populated by trees, the foliage was composed of twisting, pale-red vines that snaked upwards with a stiffness belying their width. The vines were composed of packed fibres with an almost glassy sheen, that reminded her most strongly of fibreglass, or perhaps some sort of wound electrical cable inexplicably transmuted to crystal. It seemed unlikely that each individual vine could hold its own weight as they snaked through three-dimensional space at seeming random, but as they twisted through and around each other, the tight lattice of vines wove together, supporting their collective weight. The end result was a complex interwoven cage of glossy red-white fibres, like a rope-climbing net in three dimensions, supported from the bottom up by thick trunk-like ropes that, despite a wide variation in size, thinned out on average as the canopy rose upward, towering over and above her.
This strange construction was forcing itself out of the forest floor, which- she wasn't sure if forest floor was even the right word to describe what she was standing on. Instead of soil, the red vines pushed their way up out of an eerily flat white surface, unblemished aside from cracks and raised ridges where the vines poked through. The substance was slightly translucent, giving it a diffuse quality wherein it practically seemed to glow with an internal light, although the deep shadows cast by the thickest thickets of vines contradicted that interpretation.
April would have assumed that the ground was some sort of artificial flooring if it weren't for the obvious outdoorsiness of the overall tableau. The dim light shining down through the vine canopy was diffuse and misty, but it had the character of overcast daylight. Getting to her feet, she experimentally pressed the toe of her boot—still buckled up to her thighs in preparation for a night out on the town—into the flat white ground. After applying some threshold amount of pressure she felt a slight give, and her foot made a soft, indented impression in the surface. It was similar to pressing a fingertip into a plate of agar.
She stared at the imprint for a moment, wordlessly, before collapsing to the ground in a cowering heap. Wedging her head between her knees, she stared down at the smooth white ground, fingers white-knuckling the legs of her jeans in the rictus of a silent, somatic scream. She kept at that for a moment or two, before deciding that it should probably be a verbal scream too. She thrust her face upwards towards the woven red vine canopy, as if searching for a sign from God, or perhaps a descending rescue helicopter.
"WHAT THE FUCK!"
She let the tension fall out of her limbs again, and flopped down into a cross-legged pose, propping her chin on her arms as she gazed blankly ahead. Her shout had apparently disturbed the local... wildlife...?, and the strange popping-clicking calls had halted for the space of five seconds or so, before slowly fading back in with a cautious, exploratory uncertainty.
April jumped as something small moved in the periphery of her vision; looking up, she watched as a small, tubular creature crawled its way along a stretch of vine a few metres in front of her. The thing was about the size and shape of a large caterpillar, a bright toothpaste blue, and with two large circular suckers on each end of its body. It moved by performing a rhythmic pattern of somersaults, each time attaching one end of its body to the vine, before flipping the back end up over the top of itself in a stepping motion reminiscent of a slinky moving down stairs.
She stared at it in silence for a minute or so as it marched its way across the length of the vine with impressive haste, then made a sharp turn into a tight thicket and vanished out of sight.
"Where the fuck am I," April whispered again, staying quiet this time, but injecting feeling into the words for her own benefit.
In lieu of anything more constructive to do, she picked herself up once more, peering uncertainly into the tangle of vines in roughly the direction where the small creature had disappeared.
The vines were thick where they pushed out from the ground, often resembling particularly acrobatic tree-trunks as the thickest approached three feet across. The interwoven structure was fairly dense close to the ground as well, the vine matrix netting together to provide mutual self-support. This might ordinarily have prevented April from being able to fit between the branching vines, were it not for the fact that the tangling vines were too regularly interspersed to truly be called a tangle at all. The shape of rough geometric arrangements jumped out at her, with several vines knotted together at the intersection points, but leaving sizeable gaps between them, over and through which she could step.
As she started to move forwards, she was surprised to discover that she had missed the strangest thing about the space she was in until that moment.
Taking a step, she felt an unnatural pressure clamp around her body from the sides, pushing inwards with a soft but implacable force. The sensation was similar to the weight felt while immersed in water, but localized laterally to her sides. Nonplussed and slightly concerned, she took a more rapid step forwards in an attempt to escape from whatever force had hold of her, only for the cloying pressure to increase in tandem with her step.
Digging her heel into the smooth ground, she quickly reversed course, trying to escape whatever invisible something had apparently been lying in wait, just a few feet in front of where she landed. Twisting around, she felt the crushing pressure abate, and then, bizarrely, reverse. Now it was as if she was being stretched out sideways, her flesh tugged at by a vacuum pump that was evenly attached across her entire cross-section. She stumbled back the way she had come from before, and the sucking pull increased proportionally, not precisely painful but definitely uncomfortable. It was enough to make her wheeze out a sharp breath before she managed to catch herself and hold still.
Frozen mid stride in an awkward, hunched over pose, she lifted up one hand, cautiously, and then waved it back and forth in experimentation. Once again, she felt the cloying compressive force as she moved the hand towards the thicket, mirrored by a sucking vacuum pull as she waved it back the other way.
Shifting her body cautiously, April wobbled back and forth on the spot, then lifted her other arm to wave around that hand as well. As she did, she began to feel out a shape to the effect that she had already begun to intuit. It was less that she was being assaulted by an invisible assailant, and more that something in the… air? The surrounding environment? ...was resistant to her movement. The sensation had been too subtle to notice while she had been sitting still on the ground, but when she attempted motion with any sort of velocity it was painfully obvious.
The restriction didn't appear to be a blanket effect, however. It was limited to one opposing pair of cardinal directions, such that—April was waving her hands back and forth with vigour now, feeling out the contours of the bizarre pressure—moving forward and backward would produce the crushing and sucking force in her hand, at right angles to that direction of motion.
More baffled now than afraid, she braced herself, and took a few steps forward at a swift half-jog. The inward pressing force clamped around her, and while it was not unbearable…
Rather than continue the way she had been going, she made a turn 90 degrees to her left, moving orthogonally to the direction of the effect. Immediately the crushing force abated, leaving her feeling mostly normal.
"Not that way then," she thought to herself, stepping over a clump of the vines as she set off in earnest. "At least I won't have issues keeping my bearings in this."
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
There was little else to mark direction by as she walked. The arrangements of stiff trunk-like vines she was climbing over and around seemed to change little as she passed through them. They didn't appear to grow any sort of leaves, and this should in theory have given her a good visibility into the near distance, but where the forest horizon wasn't obscured by the receding lattice of foliage, a thin white mist hung in the air, muting the light and concealing the depths of any gaps.
As she walked, April passed more of the somersaulting caterpillar creatures plodding earnestly along the vines, as if carrying out some urgent but inscrutable errand. At one point she disturbed a whole clutch of the things when she bumped into an uncharacteristically loose vine-branch. A cluster of a dozen or so of the little critters, each in a slightly varying shade of bright blue, excitedly back-flipped away in all directions, erupting with a chorus of tiny plip- plip- plip- sounds as their sucker ends adhered to the fibrous vine-material.
As she watched them scurry off, still wary but judging that the creatures were probably something she didn't need to be immediately frightened of, April froze. A more substantial clicking-popping chirr was filtering down from somewhere above her. It had a subtle, sly character to its softness, reminding April of how a stalking cat might growl under its breath before moving in for the pounce.
As if to complete the metaphor, something plummeted down out of the canopy above her. April jumped back, inadvertently being smacked in the sides by the reactive pressure effect, before crashing into a vine interstice and stopping. There had been no need, however, because the thing—it wasn't particularly distinguishable as more than an amorphous pale blue blur at this point, as it darted downwards and along a vine—didn't seem to be focused on her. Rather, it dived at high speed towards a cluster of the fleeing caterpillar-things, catching them unawares as they twisted and flipped wildly around in a vain attempt to escape.
The thing crashed into the fleeing creatures like the oncoming tide flooding over driftwood in a barren cove, and in doing so slowed enough to be more visible. It was a sort of amorphous blob, also blue in colour but a paler, more translucent shade than its prey, and with hard bits and pieces of something unclassifiable suspended in the mass. It slurped up the fleeing critters into its jelly-like body similarly to how an unapologetic restaurant critic might finish off a plate of spaghetti. April could see the absorbed creatures wriggling around unproductively within the blob as they were added to the internal detritus.
Suppressing a wince of disgust, she kept her eyes on the feasting blob while she backed away cautiously. To avoid having to move past it, she was forced to walk in the direction of the compressive force, so she kept her footsteps short and slow so as to avoid the worst of the effect. Reaching a horizontal vine-trunk that barred the way, she felt it out with the back of her legs, then softly grabbed hold of another vine above her to help guide her movement as she stepped over and behind the barrier.
Continuing in that manner, she managed to put a good twenty metres of red forest between herself and the feasting Thing. Finally judging that she was probably at a safe distance to walk normally, she turned around and stepped forwards, just in time for her to crash head-first into something cold and hard that had been standing directly behind her.
The something turned out to have been a tall metal suit of armour. Or, rather, it was something halfway between the raiment of a medieval knight and an old-fashioned deep-sea diver. It appeared to be made out of a tarnished, brushed grey steel, with bulbous joints and a raised, pointed chest-piece like the prow of a battleship. On the back was strapped a bulky rectangular box reminiscent of what an astronaut might wear during a spacewalk, and the helmet was curiously elongated, with a large round central aperture surmounted by a bulbous secondary lobe at the top, in a snowman configuration.
The suit had a black stripe painted across its left breast, upon which was embossed, inexplicably,
"AUẞENBANDÜBERWACH AUSSCHUSS 10".
The figure within the suit—because, April realised as it moved, it was occupied—reached up a hand and clamped it down on her shoulder, metal fingers locking in a tight squeeze. As April cried out and attempted to pull away, it raised its remaining hand to its throat, fingers closing around a small knob at the base of the helmet and twisting with a forced delicacy. Immediately, a blast of white noise screeched out of the helmet in a pulse of amplifier feedback, startling April out of her attempts at escape. The figure continued to twiddle with the knob, and the noise cohered into the crowded sound of several dozen overlapping voices, each shouting or muttering insistently in a separate language, dialect or tone.
"Let me go!", April shouted at the suit, which still had its hand locked firmly around her shoulder with a tight, crushing grip she couldn't quite squeeze out of.
The suit figure lifted its bulbous head slightly, but didn't release her, continuing to adjust the knob at its throat. As it did, the competing voices began to be pared down, the audio channel narrowing until finally there were just a few voices speaking, then two, then one, which- April was finally able to parse a nondescript male baritone speaking English in a faintly European accent.
"...what are you?"
"Let go!" April shouted again, reaching up to pry at the unmoving metal grip. "Let go of me!"
A babble of competing voices rose from the suit again, and the figure continued its adjustments, narrowing them down until only the single voice was audible once more. "Why are you here?"
"I have no fucking idea," she spat at it, still pulling at her shoulder, "I don't know where this is, I- Hrgh-! Let me go!"
The suit dropped the hand that had been adjusting the knob to its side, and tilted its head, as if considering her. It didn't release her shoulder.
"You will need to speak to the committEe." The final word blasted out with a brief burst of accompanying static, like the speaker mechanism he had been adjusting was still unclogging its circuits. April winced at the feedback whine.
"I don't know where this is and, hey- who are- what d..." April scrambled for a moment, struggling to decide what she wanted to say, before finally settling once again on "let go of me!"
The grip at her shoulder loosened slightly, as if the figure was considering it. "No suit? The axes are askew here. Be glad you did not accrue velocity." Something in the suit whirred as it made slight movements. "Did you enter by bridge, or..." it paused, looking down at her. "No. You are a child of memory?"
"What?"
"From the land of the dead." The suited figure spoke with a shrug in its voice, as if this much was obvious.
"What?" said April, too confused to continue fighting its grip.
The suit cocked its helmeted head, considering her, and looked like it was about to speak again before both it and April jumped, the heavy suit jolting as April twisted around, both of them looking for the source of a sound that had come from behind her.
They didn't have to look very far.
A loud popping-cracking-chirping was sputtering out from a dangling pale-blue curtain of slime that was slithering down from a raised branch like a slow-motion waterfall. April could still see the remnants of the blue caterpillar creatures suspended inside the translucent flesh, but the blob creature—which apparently was capable of hearing, and of investigating sudden loud bursts of audio static—had swelled out until it was a living sheet strung across a full three meter span, looming over both her and the suit. The rubbery mass, she could now see, was interspersed not just with half-digested detritus but also with longer, sharp, off-white spine, somewhere between a loose rib and a baleen spar. A few of them protruded from the surface, sharp points bristling ominously.
"GO," barked the suit, releasing its hand from her shoulder as it swivelled around and began to jog away, the metal legs pistoning as they powered directly through a knot of smaller vines as if they weren't even there. April jolted forward to follow, only to realise that the suit had run in the direction that induced the crushing pressure.
Wincing from pain at the sharp slap against her sides, she twisted around, sprinting sideways past the hanging creature at an angle so as to remain unimpeded by the pressure. She glanced at the thing, and out of the corner of her eye watched a clot of rubbery blue flesh as it balled itself up and shot out at her, forming the thick end of a tendril that arced across the empty space just behind her head, to adhere to vine branch on the other side of the small clearing that she and the suit had been standing in.
April looked back, hoping that she had slipped away from the blob creature, but the thing had, after all, already demonstrated the speed with which it could move when compelled. The surface of the thing rippled, then bunched up, coiling and releasing in a lightning fast lunge that it seemed to carry with it as it moved. It bunched, jumped and sprung between vines, flying through the forest at a startling pace for something that lacked legs, arms, or a tail.
Seemingly judging April an easier target than the already out-of-sight metal suit, it snaked after her through the geometric knots of vines, seemingly perfectly at home within the terrain while April tripped and stumbled over herself. It let out a sort of cackling vibratory trill as it moved, and she wasn't sure whether it was as a war cry or just the natural sound of its motion.
Dodging through the red vine-trunks, April had barely half a second to spot a dense knotting of them coming up in front of her that had woven themselves into a pleasing octagonal rosette, which she would have otherwise been interested to examine, but which right now was completely blocking her progress. She was forced to thrust out her hand, almost bouncing off of the tough surface and breaking a few of the glossy outer fibre layers as she transferred her momentum and threw herself off to the left. As her feet picked up again, she realised that the shift in bearing had forced her to run directly into the direction of the pulling force, which was now screaming at her skin as she powered through the undergrowth and "upstream".
It felt as if someone had attached vacuum pumps across both sides of her body, or as if the doors of an aeroplane had opened on either side of her at 30,000 feet. Her ears popped uncomfortably, and she felt her skin grow warm at her ears and cheeks, blistering from the negative pressure. Instinctively she tried to slow her movement, but- no, it's still coming!, she realised as she glanced back, hearing the rhythmic chirring sound of the creature. Its own gelatinous body seemed uncowed by the effect. She forced herself to push through the pain of motion until a gap opened up once more to her right, and she was able to pivot back around to a safe line of travel, letting out a sigh of relief.
The creature, however, had been able to take advantage of her zig-zagging path, cutting across the diagonals and gaining on her as it streaked through the outstretched vines. Gaggles of somersaulting caterpillars practically jumped out of its way, but it paid them no heed, fixated on the larger prey that was April. She shot a glance backwards and saw its reaching tendrils stretching out scarily close, individual palp-tipped pseudopods straining out of the larger body towards her skin like a rock climber straining to grip the edge of a cliff. Her heart pounding, legs pistoning, April tore away from the reaching blue fronds, vaulting over outcrops of vines and weaving between the geometric apertures where they interwove.
As she turned her head back forwards, she caught sight of a flash of further movement out of the corner of her eye, and did a double take. Something was moving rapidly through the branches, around a dozen feet to her right, keeping pace with her as it moved parallel to the direction she was running. Another blob-creature?! April braced herself to twist back left again and away from the thing, but... no, that wasn't right. The moving shape was too regular, too consistent in size when compared to the amorphous shifting blob, and she could discern limbs reaching out, catching and grasping as it swung in a bounding, soaring motion through the vine forest.
As she ran and it swung, it passed out of a shadowy copse and was briefly illuminated by a shaft of misty light, allowing her to see it clearly.
It was the monkey.
The bright fractal starburst of colour that was its painted face shone starkly against its light brown fur and the uniformly white-red background as it swung through the knotted vegetation. Its eyes—a shade of deep scarlet that almost but not quite matched the paler fibres of the vines—caught the light as it glanced over at her. Its head was held remarkably steady as the little arms shot out, catching handholds and grip-points as it swung its way through the maze of branches with the ease of an experienced swimmer pushing off for a leisurely backstroke at the local spa. Their eyes meeting, April and the monkey stared at each other wordlessly while they zipped through the forest, April wheezing with her strained breaths, the monkey seemingly impassive.
It opened its mouth as if to say something, exposing its row of tiny, dagger-like incisors.
April, whose flying feet had been sprinting across the too-smooth forest floor with little care, the sudden appearance of the monkey distracting her, felt a sharp lurch as her ankle caught on a low-reaching strand of vine. Stumbling, she catapulted over it, before fully losing her balance and face-planting into the slightly pliable white surface with a thick smack that left a rough imprint of her features in the ground. Twisting around onto her back, she had just enough time to thrust out her arms in front of her chest before the pursuing creature was upon her, landing on top of her body with a heavy thwack.
Shouting out, April tore at the thing with her hands, trying to get a grip on the tough, rubbery blue flesh. The creature had draped itself over her like a pitched tent with her arms as the supporting spars, and was rapidly pooling itself together with a burbling slurp. The weight of the thing was immense, and she was pinned down by her legs and outstretched arms, just barely fighting to keep it off of her face. The sharp white spines that had been embedded in its body began slide outwards in a sharp flicking motion, propelled by some inner propulsive adjustment of whatever gelatinous material the thing was made from. No less than seven of them lodged themselves into her forearms and wrists, the points piercing flesh and digging into muscle, seemingly scraping against bone.
April screamed for real, now.
A blob of pale blue animate slime pooled at the foremost protrusion of the encompassing curtain of creature-flesh, filling out until it was a suspended droplet hanging above her head, the organism flowing into itself. Suspended a few inches above her face, April could see one of the blue caterpillar-things, still held inside the beast, as it was drawn into the new appendage. Slightly occluded by the cloudy material it was embedded in, she could see how its outer surface had become slightly more diffuse, inner fluids spilling out as it started to be dissolved by the blue gel-flesh.
April shut her eyes as that same flesh descended a few inches above her mouth and nose.
Abruptly, a heavy thumping followed by a sharp series of brittle cracks burst from amid the surrounding vines, followed by a solid whump from just above her. As it did, she felt the pressing, cloying weight of the blob-creature lift itself from her midriff, the thing erupting in a chorus of frantic pops and chirps that were almost shouts of pain.
Opening her eyes once more, she looked up to see the outline of the metal suit of armour standing over her, legs standing astride her prone body as it recovered from the heavy kicking motion it had just performed while attempting to avoid crushing her beneath its feet. Apparently, the figure in the suit had run up and punted the blue creature off of her, like an American footballer taking a... touchdown? No, that was the other thing. The kick had sent it crashing into the thick trunk of a vine some feet away, near where it emerged from the ground, but also seemed to have torn the amorphous body into two- no, three pieces, the sections that had been attached to April's legs and one of her arms seemingly unable to keep up with the abrupt change in velocity.
The two chunks of blobby blue slime that were still adhered to her were unmoving. Spines were still embedded in her forearms, which were screaming in pain, but the blue flesh they were emerging from was now inert. Shakily, April sat up, the thickly pulsing adrenaline in her veins staving off the worst of the pain and shock, but her eyes still smarting as she did her best to pry the sharp things from her arms. Rivulets of blood were beading and running down her hands in streaks. One of her wrists didn't seem to want to move properly any more.
The suited figure swung down one trunk-like metal gauntlet and swept its hand across the surface of her skin, yanking out the remaining spines like a no-nonsense zookeeper rescuing a guest from the ministrations of a giant escaped porcupine. April couldn't prevent herself from crying out as the points were unsheathed from her flesh, and then she shakily stood up, looking into the blank visor of the bulbous suit-helmet.
"Th... thank you..." she choked out, staring at it.
The suited figure let out a sharp burst of static like before, which quickly whittled itself down into a single word, echoing what it had said to her last time. "GO!"
Shaking off most of the remaining blue slime, April whirled around and sprinted off into the forest.
She found the monkey waiting for her after a few minutes of running. It was perched on a horizontally strung vine at around head height, one hand gripping an adjacent branch, head tilted gently as it locked eyes with her, the scarlet half-spheres reflecting her own eyes as she looked into them.
"You-!?" she shouted at it, skidding to a halt just in front of it. "You!"
The monkey cocked its head further, impassive.
"This is your fault!" she screamed, holding up her blood-streaked arms, wrists peppered with inflamed red puncture wounds, "what do you want?!"
The monkey seemed to consider for a moment, then opened its mouth.
"...leave?"
The words had a squawking quality to them, a high-pitched inhuman edge that was reminiscent of a how a parrot would imitate the sounds of words. It lilted its tone upwards at the end, almost making the word a question.
"I don't know how to fucking leave, I- I don't know where I am!" April found a tear rolling down one cheek as she shrieked in the vibrantly placid face of the monkey. "How did you get here? Where am I?!"
The monkey looked at her for another brief moment, and then barked, "direction!", before turning and darting through the vines. April tracked it for several meters as it swung effortlessly between branch fronds, until it stopped once again, pausing to turn back and stare at her. "Direction!!", it squawked, insistently.
Warily, April picked up her feet and started following after it, stepping gingerly through the foliage and squeezing through small gaps to follow the path the monkey had taken. Seeing this, it turned again, and moved off through the forest canopy once more. This time however it seemed to move more slowly and deliberately, remaining at head height, and occasionally checking back to see if April was indeed still there.
Understanding what was wanted of her, April followed as it went.
When the monkey finally paused once more, it had lead her to the edge of a clearing. As April poked her head out of the wall that was the boundary of the vine-lattice, she could see the monkey hanging out over empty space just next to her. Looking up, she had an unimpeded view of the sky, now. It was a milky, mist-streaked white, dimmer than she was used to, but with no hint of the familiar blue that was all she had ever known. Occasional thin red streaks were set across it like contrails. The net of too-even interlocked vines stretched up into that vast nothing, ascending impossibly upwards until the individual branches were out of sight.
That wasn't why she was here, though. Looking down at the smooth white ground, she saw that it had been marred in the centre of the clearing by a dark gaping maw, a slightly amorphous, gently skewed dark black paraboloid pit. Its gently rippling edges attached themselves to the ground before vanishing into a hole that descended at an angle.
Stepping up to the edge of the black material, April knelt down and reached out. Her fingertips gently kneaded the familiar texture of slightly torn, quilted black velvet as she pinched it between thumb and forefinger.
"Direction!" exclaimed the monkey.
"Fucking direction, yeah. Got it."
April glanced back at the monkey, face tight, making brief contact with its deep scarlet eyes for a short second, before she turned her gaze to the opening of the fabric tunnel and jumped down into its mouth.