Part 6 -- What is This?

The first thing Hannah noticed as she began to wake was a somewhat annoying weight pulling on her shoulder blades. It wasn't exactly unpleasant, and seemed to be evenly distributed, but it was distracting now that she was waking up. She didn't want to wake up. Shifting her grip on the ceiling beams, she was surprised when the hanging weight counterbalanced automatically, instead of swinging like a pendulum. Huh. Strange… 

Keeping her eyes stubbornly shut against the pink-hued light, which somehow felt less intense than before, Hannah rubbed the top of her head against the roof. What a delightful softness against her skin. Then she paused, slightly alarmed. Skin? Since when was she bald?! Her eyes snapped open and, in her panic, she released both of her hands from the ceiling beam to reach for the top of her head. This caused her to swing downward by her feet. Of course, they couldn't keep holding her to the ceiling alone, so she fell almost head-first towards the floor inside. 

She landed on something that folded under her weight, crying out in surprise as she simultaneously felt the thing under her fold and something heavy crush part of her. Which part of her, she somehow wasn't sure. She flailed both of her arms around successfully, so it wasn't them. Legs? No, those were free too. Tail? Not that either, it could move around just fine.

Wait.

Tail?!? Shocked again, Hannah got to her feet and started to turn around, trying to look at her tail. A spectator would have found the ensuing scene as funny as a dog chasing its tail. She ran around in circles, her tail following, and while it seemed to be much longer than a dog's tail, in her momentary panic at suddenly having one, this didn't occur to her. After several laps of this, she collapsed to lay on her stomach on the floor. That was pointless. Her mind calming somewhat, Hannah sheepishly tried controlling the tail itself like she had when flailing about to see if it could move. It whacked around energetically. So… it was hers, after all. She, for reasons completely out of her understanding, now sported a tail probably as long as she was tall. The color was obscured by both the pink light filtering through the ceiling's hole and by the darkness that still filled most of the room despite the column of illumination. Scrutinizing it, she found it was pretty thin at the tip, where three huge feathers sprouted. The central feather was incredibly long and by her estimation, made up fully half the length of her tail. The other two were much smaller, though still quite large. These grew at either side of the central one.

In the middle of flicking these feathers upwards to measure her control, she caught sight of something else. Turning her attention toward it, Hannah gasped, mind numbing in shock and perhaps denial. It was the ceiling. Illuminated by light that had bounced from the floor, she inspected it with a feeling of trepidation. It couldn't be, no way. Yet the surface, pockmarked from her many bites, was undeniably reddish in color. This alone would not have been alarming. What shocked her were the rounded beams in the ceiling. They were evenly spaced, curved around in a slight arc forming an extremely shallow dome-like roof, and white in color. White, rounded beams with little chunks of meat clinging to them where Hannah had failed to clean them completely. To give them another name: bones. Rib bones.

Hannah's gut knotted in revulsion at the discovery. More than waking up in a fluid-filled chamber days ago, more than her strangely ravenous hunger, more even than the tail she just discovered she somehow had, this shocked her. All this time, she had been eating meat?! And not just any meat. Raw meat, straight off the bone, from the inside of some gargantuan creature. It horrified her that she'd never noticed. She had never imagined that the liquid she drank on that first day could have been blood, nor that the intoxicatingly delicious enclosure was actually made entirely of flesh and bone. How on earth had that escaped her notice? Why couldn't she tell that what she was ingesting was freaking raw meat?! Why didn't it make her sick, and why did she crave it?

This last question was what scared her the most. What the heck had Dokjin done to her? How had he done it, and why? Sure, he had turned traitor, but this was such a gigantic leap from anything anyone had experienced during the Wars. Never at all had humans been kidnapped and… had whatever this was happen to them.

A chill ran up her spine as another question was sparked by her confidence in that assertion. What if, what if she was wrong in that? What if humans had been getting kidnapped all along, and turned into vicious playthings for the Aliens? Had they been among the "vicious beasts" the Aliens habitually unleashed in their attacks? Was she destined to join hundreds of other similarly abducted humans in gladiatorial combat for the enjoyment of Alien crowds? Or was she going to be experimented on? Wait, if experimentation was going to happen, then had it already occurred? She did have a tail that she didn't have before, after all. This thought stopped her panicky thought process in its tracks as a new suspicion stole her complete attention. If she had been experimented on as she now suspected, who's to say they stopped at giving her a tail and a voracious appetite? What other changes might they have wrought?

Dread caused her stomach to drop. Crap, that was actually extremely likely. These mad scientist types never held back. Steeling herself, Hannah started walking towards the column of light so that she could see herself better, when she noticed something else peculiar. She was walking… on all fours. Not crawling on hands and knees as she had been assuming she was doing. Instead, she was sprawled on all fours, hands and feet meeting the meaty floor with ease as the rest of her body nearly slid along the floor in between her limbs.

What the heck?! Hannah gasped, accidentally flipping herself sideways onto her back in a sudden attempt to use her hands and feet to stand more upright. As she did, she experienced the same folding and pressure sensations as when she fell from the ceiling. Clearly she was landing on something attached to her. This, however, got put on her mind's back burner as Hannah got a proper look at herself for the first time since getting here. Looking down at herself revealed a very lizard-like body. Four sprawling limbs, each with thin fingers tipped with curved claws, excellent for gripping. And a better view of her tail, which was quite wide at the base but thinned out quite quickly before coming to a feathered end. No, no, no, no, no! It couldn't be. A lizard?! Was she a freaking lizard now!?? But what the heck species of lizard has feathers?!

Again, Hannah found her frantic thoughts pausing with a new theory. Feathers on her tail, and a weight from her back that folded underneath her when she landed on it. Could it be?

Rolling slightly to the side to make room for what she was thinking of, she found that she could indeed control something coming from near her shoulder blades. She shifted a little bit more to free it. A long, thin wing unfurled with a jerk, coming out from where it had been under her, entering her range of vision. It was made of thick skin, contrary to her expectations. Unlike the wings of any Earth creature, these wings had stiff, leathery segmented portions almost like a fan extending from where the "hand" part of the wing would normally be. The portion under the "arm" was all one connected leathery skin section until it met the first of the "fan" section. This kind of thing shouldn't be able to work, but Hannah had a gut feeling it would.

With a harsh laugh, Hannah let her head drop backwards onto the meaty floor. Freaking wings?? She was a giant, carnivorous winged lizard now?? If she hadn't fought against them in one of the many Wars, she might have called herself a dragon. Giant, carnivorous, winged lizard. Great. Just great.

She laid there on her back for a while after readjusting her other wing so it didn't cramp up beneath her. No thoughts, she told herself. Just numbness, just block out all that had happened recently. You didn't win the Final Battles just to watch almost 90% of the barely hundred surviving humans die off in just a week. You didn't have to endure decades of harsh survival, fleeing overpowered alien invaders and struggling to grow stronger only to watch the aliens grow stronger as well. You didn't witness thousands of innocents get slaughtered, you didn't get betrayed by the biggest hero you've ever met, and you most certainly did not eat a couple tons of raw meat without realizing it. Nope. Everything is fine, I'm going to wake up from this nightmare and discover it was all just a bad dream.

Her thoughts continued like this until a gurgling sound interrupted loudly. Dang it, Hannah thought. I've been wasting this time. I should have been trying to find an alternate source of food or, barring that, at least trying to figure out where I am. Instead I've stayed here in a hollowed-out, dead likely-alien, bemoaning my fate. She went to slap her cheeks as if to wake herself up, almost stabbing her eyes out with her claws in the process. Her eyes were clearly much closer to her cheeks than they had been before. Luckily, her eyelids closed quickly enough so no damage was done. Interesting, she thought. My eyelids must be pretty durable, then.

Rolling onto her stomach, then removing her wing from under her since she'd unknowingly rolled onto it in the process, Hannah braced herself. She was hungry. Surrounded by food and wishing she could go back to not knowing what it was, Hannah did the only logical thing and bit into the walls. It was a question of survival. Nothing more.

As she did, all thoughts of disgust and wariness fled. Golly, this stuff was good. Closing her eyes in bliss, Hannah attacked the wall with renewed enthusiasm, temporarily forgetting all those useless thoughts of humanity's downfall, that man's betrayal, and silly regret. Who could regret anything in the face of such a delectable feast? It was intoxicating, invigorating, divine. It shone so brightly on the fog of such meaninglessly dark things that they disappeared like smoke, leaving only a delightfully clear mind and heart. Such clarity was obviously superior.