For most of your life, your experience with the concept of falling was often just a short trip between two places. You recall once back in school where you had been leaning on your chair in chemistry class—and the time between the legs slipping out from beneath you and you being sprawled out across the floor had felt like a split second. Nearly instant. Another event, where taking up parkour to impress your peers had seemed like a good idea, had given you a brief second to regret your actions before you got off with a warning in the form of a twisted ankle.

So now, as you drop through this tube and air whips around you, it is something of a novel feeling to consciously have these thoughts as you continue to drop—to what you can only assume is something that will shatter you legs up through the rest of your torso. It is both horrifying and abstract, as realistically, you must be an unfathomable distance below the pool area now. Not that anything has been realistic as of late.

The noise bouncing off the walls of this tube has long sounded like a rhythmic hum, your passage downwards unchanging in any way. There is just darkness and the constant vertigo and sensation of having nothing below your feet. Your muscles ache from keeping yourself bundled up like a torpedo, not willing to flail and accidentally clip the walls.

Just as you are about to calm yourself and find some calm in falling in perpetuity, you hit the side.

Expecting to rag-doll and bounce around the cylindrical tube from the force, you slide instead. The reason for the sudden contact is a slight curve in the passageway. You feel the pressure against your back as the gradient changes slightly, the wall oddly smooth instead of tiled like expected.

Before you have a chance to consider what this means, dull light washes over you as you are ejected from the tube. You plow into something that you at first believe is the shattered parts of your lower body, before you slow to a stop—buried beneath the light weight of something that clicks in the back of your mind.

The sound rubs away at an old memory of yours, and as your shaking hand grasps at the plastic sphere closest to you, the texture is undeniable.

You sit up, like a zombie rising from the grave, allowing a tide of multi-colored balls to roll away from you. While your eyes adjust, it’s just as you think.

This is a ball pit.

Even now, as you struggle to right yourself against the soft and unstable hoard of plastic, the place you are now in strikes a scene that is so familiar but can’t be right. You haven’t been in a place like this for probably a decade, yet as you look around, you aren’t comforted by the sight.

It’s some manner of indoor children’s play park. Short-legged tables and chairs painted gaudy colors sit under a dim light on the left side of the room, atop carpeted flooring in a patterned design that has long aged from the vibrancy it should have. A shuttered off kitchen sat at the far end, signs with illegible text from this distance, but there was a cartoon lion painted on one wearing an apron and chef's hat.

As your eyes turn further, the right side of the room has a netted off section full of different levels of obstacles. Padded shapes of varying design, rollers, rope ladders to climb, and pipes to crawl through. To your direct right, where you have emerged into this place, sat a small house with the slide that delivered you here—but the top is clearly visible as something you could enter if you climbed up into the house.

The air is stale here, but you still shiver as it is barely warmer than the pools. Once you get moving, you should warm up. You push your way through the ball pit, the clattering sound as the light plastic parts way an echo of the last time you had been somewhere like this. A time when things were better. Given the current situation, that is a vague platitude.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

You roll your eyes to yourself as you swing out over the wall and drop to the faded carpet. At least this place has some lighting, even if it is dull and sporadic. It looks closed for the night. As you turn to find a place to exit here—or find some manner of trial to overcome—you stop at the sight of something in the obstacle course.

A figure, although short, like a toddler. It was a doll. Barely over a foot tall, maybe. Curled brown hair and fair skin. An innocent enough smile. Standing motionless with stubby arms out to the side like it was requesting to be picked up. Even with the scant amount of light, you could see that it had no eyes. Just pits of darkness.

Out of the horrors that have been pursuing you through this nightmare, this was perhaps the least intimidating. It still has you pause, of course, and you aren’t about to goad it into doing something you will regret - but you almost have some confidence in you that this area can be beaten easily enough.

Your eyes glance over to the doorways that lead out of this area—the Party Zone according to a sign you can now read over on the left wall. There’s a door beside the kitchen that says Fun Jungle Chefs Only, and another exit just behind the main body of the obstacle course. This one doesn’t have a sign.

Given that you are nowhere close to the title of being a chef of any kind, the other direction seems like the best way to go.

You look back to the doll and are unsurprised to find it is no longer there. Although you aren’t much for horror movies, you have always thought that showing the monster too early ruins some of the horror. Of course, the library creature was frightening enough being in plain sight, so perhaps living the horror differs from being part of it.

After a couple of steps away from the ball pit, you turn your head back to see the doll sitting in the window of the plastic house. Same inert pose, just staring at you.

“You might have to do a little better than that,” you say, before walking toward the door out of here.

The loud crash of something slamming into the metal shutters of the kitchen ahead has you jump, regretting your goading immediately. There is an angered growl from within the kitchen, as a second heavy bashes up against the covering again, denting some of the long panels. Whatever it is, getting out of this room remains the best idea.

You run on tired feet over to the door. Expecting it to be locked, you let out a gasp of relief as the handle turns and allows you entrance. You step through immediately, and close it behind you as quietly as possible. While the raging chef has become silent, you do not want to clue them in to where you’re going. Not that there are many options.

This new room has a stage on the right side. Thick curtains of deep crimson hang across the back of it, inert lights affixed around the curved edge. The rest of the room is a mess of single chairs. A cheap kind that folded up, and in three different pastel colors. Blue, yellow, peach. Probably arranged into rows at some point, but they have been shuffled around as if something had charged through. You are finding that exact situation more likely by the second.

Over on the left side, past the chairs, is a long table that looks to have items on it. Papers, the wall-mounted light on the wall seems to indicate. You walk along the left wall and circle around to the table.

There are a few faded flyers for several shows that would be put on here. The theme seems to be anthropomorphic animals, this building known as the Fun Jungle. With dots over the 'u' to look like a smiley face. There is a lion, a rhino, a giraffe, and something else that has faded away. Zebra, perhaps? Scanning over these themed shows, your eyes focus on something unlike the others.

An aged and dirty piece of paper that is square rather than rectangle, and if it wasn’t for the thick lines of red across it, it would be blank.

Your muscles tense up as you pull it closer with your fingers.

You found the door, it reads.

Something you have known for a while, and is slightly less shocking since you didn’t have to pluck this message out of your own body.

There’s something about this message that is different. The way the text is aligned and the style of handwriting makes it look more like there is a secondary message hidden within it. A key or secret code?

You take it and add it to your inventory. It folds neatly and fits in your pocket behind your phone.

With a twitch, you turn your head and see the curtain shuffle slightly. As if something was watching you from the gap but has ducked out of the way rather than allow you to spot them. The doll, maybe? Glancing over to the door, you figure that the angry figure in the kitchen might be the rhino. Somehow you don’t believe it will look as chummy in real life as the cartoon version on the posters are keen to indicate.

This room has two new exits. The closest door to you says Locker Rooms, and further down is Jungle Arcades.

You sigh, and make your way over, deciding which sounds the least dire.