It’s not every day that you noclip out of reality and end up somewhere outside of the bounds of normal space and time - but even though The Poolrooms is more pleasant on the surface than The Backrooms, it still has its own fair share of nasty surprises. And, evidently, its own share of nice surprises, if the inflatable orca pooltoy you find while in desperate need of a hug is any indication. Not to mention its own share of weird surprises, once said orca starts to move about and talk, like any other living thing - and its own share of BIG surprises, because it doesn’t seem content to stay small and cute for very long…




Purely speaking for myself, I’ve never found liminal spaces to be particularly scary at all - whatever fear factor they trigger in other people just doesn’t seem to apply to be, for whatever reason. I think they’re neat, I think they look cool - some I even find ‘comfy’ or ‘cosy’, somehow - but usually not very scary.

(Usually, of course - there’s always exceptions!)

Despite the thoroughly modern internet setting, this story ended up feeling like a throwback to an earlier era of my own writing; specifically to when I first got my start writing to begin with; on writing.com, on the old Giant Friendly Animals interactive - as in, somewhere around 2011/2012. Realising that I hadn’t written a single story for my FurAffinity gallery with that interactive’s specific usual combination of intelligent/talking ferals and ‘clean’ macro growth (and often incorporating both harmless destruction and massive growsplosions) was definitely a little bit of a shock - especially given that I’ve been adding to this gallery for slightly over ten years now (not including dry periods/absences) - but now that I’ve realised it, I’ve at least made notes to try it more in the future.

Contents:
Backrooms/Poolrooms/liminal space setting
Light horror elements (focused towards the beginning; claustrophobia)
Orca (female)
Female growth
Feral growth
Macro growth
Macro/megamacro/gigamacro/teramacro/cosmic macro (multiple astronomical units in size)
Explosive growth/growsplosions
Inflatables/pooltoys/living inflatables/balloonies (female, orca)
Latex/vinyl/etc
Destruction/harmless destruction (environmental/poolrooms)
Ascension to godhood/apotheosis
Swearing/rude language

Word count: 14,405

This one’s too big to fit into the description, but you can read a preview below - if you want the entire thing, though, you’ll have to download it!

---

Chlorine.

The sound of water gradually rippling or splashing, and of wet feet on cool tiled floors, and beach-balls and pool-toys being thrown around or forced underwater. Happy shrieking and laughter, and the feeling of a hot sun overhead whose warmth is muffled by the pleasant cold of the water.

And the smell of chlorine.

There's lot of different little things that can come together to form a sense of place, but if you had to summarise the idea of a swimming pool in terms of memories and senses - to render it down into its happiest, most nostalgic, most ideal form (or perhaps its platonic ideal), those are the things you'd used to help define it. Especially, above all else, the smell of chlorine. It's a strange smell, if you really think about it - not pleasant in the conventional sense like a bed of roses or the smell of sugar or other foods wafting through the air, though also far from being unpleasant in any real way. It's a smell so singularly linked to one specific kind of place that it brings back a flood of memories and ideas the instant it hits your nostrils, and it's so unmistakable - so iconic in its own odd way - that it could never be confused for anything else.

In other words, it's a strangely fitting smell for the place you've found yourself in without much in the way of explanation. At least for you, the smell of chlorine (as you've never believed the idea that that particular smell is actually from kids peeing in the pool) is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, instead hovering somewhere between the two. It's a smell that could be described as liminal, and the same very much goes for where you are now - a place that isn't quite nowhere, yet at the same time isn't quite somewhere either.

It's a place made up of rooms and corridors where the floors and ceilings and walls are all universally lined in perfectly-clean, bright white tiles, free from even a single spot of dirt or grime. It's a place filled with water - sometimes ankle-deep, sometimes knee or thigh or waist-high, in bodies and pools and in artificial rivers and causeways and lakes; sometimes as small as bathtubs or ponds, sometimes so vast that all you can see is a watery horizon and a far-off wall of tiled white.

To put a name to it, this is The Poolrooms - and the entire thing smells of chlorine.

Even though you're not quite sure how or when you found yourself here, an odd lack of urgency has settled over you. It might be because of the lack of backrooms entities or monsters or whatever other sorts of things people made up on the internet to scare each other with, or it might be the curious lack of hunger or thirst that's settled over you, as if those needs have simply been airbrushed out of existence for however long the duration of your stay in this weird space might be - or, hell, maybe it's just a sense of shock so complete and all-consuming it doesn't even register as such - but whatever the reason for it, you're determined to at the very least make the most of things.

Even if you're not entirely sure if all of this is real or a dream or not.

The room you're in right now is well-lit, about the size of an actual (or maybe 'proper') indoor swimming pool. About half of the floor space is given over to a thick strip of tiled white, the other descending into a neck-deep pool via a short, sharp drop without any stairs to aid getting in or out. The tiled section has two corridors leading in and out, a little like miners' tunnels cut into a sheer cliff face. And there's a set of massive windows, through which a bright (though not harsh) light shines, which you've been contemplating for a while, as you sit on the very edge of the pool, legs dangling in the cool water with your pants and underwear removed so as to not get them wet.

You can't help but wonder just where the light coming through that window might be originating from. You haven't seen any signs of electronics, so far - nothing that could be called a device, barely even anything that could be called an object other than the occasional lines of poolside loungers and chairs and the odd table (and once or twice, a very convenient towel) - so you're pretty confident in saying that it's not the result of a set of massive flood lights pointed into the poolrooms from some nebulous outside. Maybe the light is simply there - as inexplicable and sourceless as the Poolrooms themselves.

Maybe, you wonder, the Poolrooms is orbiting the sun, exactly opposite the Earth, so that it's permanently hidden from mankind and always has been, and always will be.

(You don't put too much stock in that last idea, though - if that was the case, satellites would have picked up the giant set of rooms floating in space even before you were born.)

(...And you're pretty sure you read something, somewhere, about the Backrooms being 600 million miles in size - just over 6 entire astronomical units in size ((That is, six times the distance between the Earth and the Sun)) - and if that in any way applies to the Poolrooms you're now inside, it wouldn't exactly be possible to keep under wraps for very long.)

For a pretty, decently long while, you simply stare - idly noting that your eyes really don't seem to be suffering any sort of pain or strain as you do so, despite looking into a light whose brightness really ought to be whiting them out with how many stars it puts into your eyes. It's a little bit like every single one of your needs, other than breathing, has simply had the pause button hit - and given how long you've been able to stay underwater, you have a sneaking suspicion that even that might no longer apply.

Whatever the reason - for the light coming in through the windows (if they even are windows, with something on the other side), for the mere existence of the Poolrooms you find yourself in, for your presence in this place - you're grateful for the sense of calm that's descended over you, because you're pretty certain you'd have had a full-blown, Poolrooms-sized freakout without it.

You continue to stare, and eventually grow bored; and then you pick yourself up, wait to dry off, re-dress, and move onto the next room, everything rather quiet save for the slapping of your wet feet on the cool white tiles.

You make your way through one of the corridors, though it feels more like a tunnel - just about long enough that it starts to grow dim and then dark, before you emerge once more.

This new room is much smaller than the one that preceded it - still white-tiled, still bright, though undeniably a little more compact; rather than a full-sized, proper swimming pool in a leisure centre, it's closer to something a very rich person might conceivably be able to have installed inside a house - the water sloshing back and forth in a pool just about small and deep enough to permit skinny-dipping (and not much else) as if rocked by a wave machine or slapped about by the splashing of enough excited swimmers, though with no obvious source for its motion. You spend a few moments poking about, though fail to find anything capable of holding your attention like the windows that did so before.

You pick another hallway that branches off, and walk through it, emerging into the next room.

A splash of colour breaks the uniform white, a rainbow's worth of giant plastic slides - the sort that are enclosed on all sides, one red, one yellow, one orange and so on, arranged in a neat line - project out of a wall, terminating inside of an industrial-sized pool ringed in by a U-shaped, quay-like island of tiles. You strip off and jump into the water, swimming over to the slides and trying to make your way up - but you're too wet and they're too steep and slippery, and so in a huff you make your way back to the 'shore', contenting yourself with wondering about where they might go instead of actually seeing.

Some part of you wonders if, with how physically-impossible the Poolrooms seem to be, anything that appears to emerge into or from another room actually does so. You wouldn't have been surprised to see a solid wall of tiles if you'd managed to squirm your way right up to the top, in the same way that you briefly wondered if there really was an outside for the windows you saw earlier to connect to. You hum in thought - before something piques your interest, stealing your attention away from the slides and the idea of trying to wriggle your way up them again.

This room has a few more corridors branching off from it - the one you came out of, a broad tunnel almost big enough to drive a car through - and a much thinner one, just about big enough to permit you to walk through normally. The broader corridor is level - but the thinner one has stairs.

You haven't seen stairs before, up until now.

(Not in general, of course, just while you've been inexplicably yet calmly trapped in this odd space.)

You remember a few liminal space images - CGI or photoshops, probably - of The Poolrooms. Not many of them seemed to contain stairs, instead being presented almost as a single flat plane with everything laid out on top of it; more like a hedge-maze than a single multi-storey building. Standing at the precipice of the first step, you can't see all of the way down, but your feet are already moving before you can start to consider if what you're doing is a bad idea.

A few moments later, you justify it to yourself - you don't know how long you're going to be in this place, so you might as well take the opportunity to explore it. Supposing you're not just inside of a very odd, detailed dream to begin with, for all you know you might simply fall through the floor and end up right back in your bedroom on Planet Earth. That was, after all, how people were meant to get to The Backrooms to begin with - right? - so, you assume that the same applies to both The Poolrooms, and to leaving the both of them.

You're pretty sure the idea of having to find a single specific exit-point inside of 600 million miles of mono-yellow and moist carpet - or, more fitting, 600 million miles of tile-white and moist... Uh, water? - came from one of the video games.

You're pretty sure.

...You hope so.

You move slowly, carefully, more than aware of just how easy it is to slip on a tiled floor with wet feet, and glad that the corridor you're beginning to make your way down has handrails along both sides. One step, five, ten - you go so slowly that it takes almost half a minute just to go that far. And by that same token, half a minute turns into one minute, then two, then five, gradually shimmying your hands down the cool metal rails and your feet down each step in turn. After a while you turn back to look at where you came from, finding the entrance to the corridor just about too far away that you can no longer properly see through it. You turn back, continuing to move. Briefly, you have the idea of counting the steps as a way to pass the time and speed things up a little, but you dismiss it when you realise you'd need to make your way all the way back up to the top in order to do something like that. Seven minutes - eight - nine - slowly, the light in the corridor begins to grow dimmer, and by the same token you start to wonder just how far down it goes. Maybe, you wonder, this isn't so much a corridor or hallway equipped with a set of stairs as a way to travel to an entire set of -Rooms entirely, be they Back- or Party- or Grass- or whatever - like a miners' tunnel cut into the rock to permit entry to a deep pit - or maybe the size of the individual rooms of the weird space you're in are so great that the stairs you're taking one step at a time simply have to be that long, so that individual layers can actually be stacked on top of or under each other without in some way breaking the laws of physics.

(Or, rather, without breaking them even further)

The light dims further. Further. The top of the stairs continues to recede, washed out first by distance and then by a subtle gloom that starts to come over everything. There are no lights overhead, no obvious source of light - more so an odd, ambient glow that suffuses everything - and so you can still see.

But only for so long.

You continue to descend, step by step, until the point where it becomes hard to see your feet and hands in front of you. There's still no sign of wherever you might be working your way towards - no blinding burst of light from the end of the hallway, no sign of an upcoming door, nothing of the sort - and so, deciding that you've had enough of exploring this particular hallway, you turn around.

And, in doing so, come face to face with a sheer, straight tiled wall.

Your mouth begins to run dry before you can even truly understand what you're seeing in front of you, barely managing to avoid rearing back on instinct. Barely a single step behind you, where there was once an open hallway filled with stairs that led up to the room you had just descended from, there is now a straight-edged wall of tiles, as straight of a ruler; as if, upon taking your feet off of it, each individual step had risen upwards to meet the ceiling.

You reach out to gently poke at the wall that wasn't there a moment ago with a finger. Then, to poke at it with multiple fingers. To slap at it with a palm, to hesitantly beat at it with a fist. It doesn't move, doesn't give, doesn't break; as seemingly indestructible as the tiled-covered edge of any pool is when you're young and you're caught in that single, awful split-second of tripping over your feet and beginning to fall towards it.

Slowly, you turn around. You shudder, taking in what you hope to be a calming breath.

And you continue to descend.

As you do so, the little light you're afforded continues to dim, so steadily and imperceptibly that it's only by sudden starts and realisations you realise it even does so at all. Your grip on the handrails to either side of you turns into a white-knuckled death-grip, your heart beginning to beat faster and stronger inside of your chest, your once-steady steps turning into an odd hybrid of slowly-hesitant and terrifiedly-quick. It isn't long before the light fades completely, and you're left in a complete, total darkness - one so deep that you can't even tell when your eyes are open or shut, other than by the feeling of you moving your eyelids. You would check to see if the wall is following you, but you can't - it's much too dark - though by the same token you don't need to. Every now and then you can feel those cool, ruler-straight tiles bumping up against your back, nuzzling against your shoulder blades mid-step as if trying to make you trip.

You can remember what it felt like to fall down the stairs as a child. There's a single heart-stopping moment of pure, primal fear, the sort that a child shouldn't really be able to experience but which is inherent to every human (and, in all likelihood, every single living being, human or animal) - then a whirlwind of tumbling and flailing limbs and crying.

This is worse - and you haven't even fallen yet, merely come close.

It grows worse still when you realise that the handrails to your sides are beginning to slowly press inwards, only able to do so by the way you can feel them brushing against your sides; not ramrod-straight as you had assumed but instead converging, moving towards a single distant point. You turn sideways, moving more awkwardly and steadily than ever despite the growing panic gripping you, trying to do your best to brush off any memories of that old Amigara Fault manga that everyone thought was the scariest thing on the entire planet somewhere between 10 and 15 years ago.

You don't exactly succeed - especially when you feel your hair brush up against the ceiling, as it too begins to narrow, the entire tunnel you're descending through beginning to compact.

To compress.

You're reduced to shuffling down on your rear, step by step, like a little kid who isn't confident their legs are able to carry them down the stairs.

The walls and ceiling squeeze in, tighter.

You proceed hunched into a ball.

They squeeze in further. You imagine the handrails looming over you, drawing closer and closer until they form a single mass. You move on your back, gradually sliding down as best you can until even your toes begin to butt up against the ceiling. You flip over onto your belly, laying as flat as possible, with no choice but to try continue squeezing onwards, even as the ceiling and walls push in, and in, and in.

Maybe this place has rules. Maybe you broke those rules.

Maybe it doesn't have rules, but it's toying with you, grabbing you and wringing you dry for every drop of blood, sweat and tears you can provide.

Maybe it's neither, and this is just the result of an infinite random chaos, like every other room in The Poolrooms.

Maybe when you die, gradually compressed and squeezed down until all that's left of you is a thick bloody pulp, you'll simply be deposited somewhere back on Earth - under the oceans or in Antarctica or in the middle of a random sewer system. Maybe that's how people disappear - they fall through the floor and they die in The Poolrooms, and then they're dropped back out somewhere where nobody will ever find them, like an owl regurgitating the bits of mice it can't digest.

You shake your head. You cry. You whimper, you plead, you beg, until even that becomes too difficult, the stairs pressing up against your chest and the ceiling smoothing down against your back and the sides against your ribs until you can barely move an inch. Tears and snot inelegantly stream down your face as you do your best to silently apologise to whatever entity might be responsible for your predicament; God or the Devil or the Poolrooms itself, shaking your head over and over and over as the soles of your feet press against a smooth, sheer wall of tiles, like a corpse's feet neatly bumping up against the end of a coffin.

You curse. You scream. You kick, as best you can.

After a very long time - maybe minutes, maybe days, maybe years or centuries or eons - something gives.

Maybe something gives inside of yourself, first. Or maybe it's the wall that gives first. You're not sure. One moment you're being squeezed, like raw meat in a grinder - the next moment you flop out through a hole, roughly deposited onto a smooth, flat tiled ground with room to move and breathe and curl up into a terrified, frightened ball once more.

For some length of time - how long, you don't quite know, because time itself is meaningless in a place like The Poolrooms - you simply sob, and fill and empty your lungs, over and over, still feeling as if you're being squeezed by phantom hands.

Eventually, though, you dry your raw, aching eyes and look up, and take your first proper look at the new space you're in.

You think you might still be in The Poolrooms, but you're not entirely sure. At the same time, you're not entirely sure that you're not still in The Poolrooms. The space you are now in is vast, and vaguely rectangular - a corridor about twice the width of a train station's platform; two strips of tiled space with a thick channel of water running between them, like a lake replicated in miniature. Thick columns just shy of being as wide around as you are tall sprout, reaching up and up - presumably up towards a distant ceiling, but travelling up so high they're simply swallowed by an inky gloom. The entire space is splashed in a dim yellow light with no source, that approaches the term sickly but doesn't quite fully commit.

If this is still The Poolrooms, you're fairly certain you just found the way into its basement.

Or maybe whatever this dimension's equivalent of a storm drain is.

For some time you simply stay there, huddled into a foetal position, wary of further provoking whatever force might have been responsible for your terrifying near-death experience, still unsure if it was malevolent or a punishment or random chaos, or maybe even simply something you had to do to enter this new place, as 'natural' as opening a door and stepping through. Here, the water flows in a single direction instead of sloshing back and forth or resting calmly, and that alone is enough to make you question if you've remained in the same liminal dimension as the one before. And on top of that, the Poolrooms were universally bright, and clean - and though this new space isn't dirty, it somehow feels as if it could be. An inky darkness gently pens you in on all sides, your visibility extending for maybe twenty or thirty feet before it begins to fade away into the black.

The odd calm that had settled over you is rather thoroughly gone, though you're pretty sure that was more because of what you just endured rather than a difference between these -Rooms and the last. You still don't feel hungry or thirsty, there's no need to empty your bladder or bowels.

You lower your head back down against your knees, chewing at your lip as you begin to think.

At least, for now, there are only two ways to go. There's no way of getting lost, even if it seems like there's no way of getting back to where you were before, given that whatever hole you were ejected from has been replaced with solid, smooth tile. You can't quite remember how it was you were meant to beat mazes - was it always staying on the left, or the right? Not that such a thing would probably help much, in a place like this, but if nothing else it's somewhere to start, something to at least keep in mind if this dingy-looking slice of a dimension starts to branch back out again.

You resolve to ignore any more stairs you find leading down. You briefly wonder about whether or not to do the same for any stairs leading up, and decide that you'll only go through them if you can see the other end.

You think, trying to figure out a plan to properly explore and escape a place that by its very nature is unable to be understood or even defined through anything other than vague feelings and half-forgotten memories and bits of pieces of sensations left over from days long past like cobwebs in the corner of an old unused attic, before a sound distracts you. For a brief moment, the gentle, steady, constant rhythm of the water through the 'river' a handful of feet away from you audibly swells - not enough to burst its banks, and only enough to even attract your notice in the first place because you weren't thinking too intently, like a stream picking up its pace for a brief moment before settling back down.

You bring your head up, looking, remembering your earlier comparison to a storm drain and suddenly fearing that a monstrous tidal wave might be about to swallow you.

There isn't - but the sight that meets your eyes is both much more welcome, and altogether stranger.

Accompanying the gentle surge in the volume and speed of water flowing through the channel, almost as if it was a blockage washed downstream and making way for more water, a toy floats into view. A pool toy. More specifically, it's an orca - the sort of inflatable orca toy that could be found in just about any airport store or cheap-though-also-designed-to-rip-off-tourists shop lurking just opposite the front entrance of a hotel somewhere hot and sunny. The sort that looks like something out of a cartoon; a few feet from front to back, the bottom half white and the top half a vivid, somehow sunny feeling shade of vivid blue, the two colours separated by a wavy border - exaggerated white splodgy eyebrows, big eyes that look expressive despite being completely still, and a set of fins, dorsal fin and a tail, and generally just proportions in general, that a marine biologist would probably find cause for serious concern if they were displayed on a real killer whale instead of a funny little toy.

And, of course, a pair of chunky-looking opaque plastic handles sticking out to the sides.

For a moment, you simply stare dumbly, blinking owlishly as the toy floats past you at a slow pace, seeming to almost be taking its time. It comes out of the darkness, into the light, intersects the point at which you're sitting - and then carries on, gently swept along by the current to parts unknown as it enters and then is swallowed by the gloomy murk.

You blink again. None of the things that you'd seen so far that could have been objects could really have in any way be classified as toys. you'd seen loungers, chairs, deck chairs, plastic tables, even the odd towel - but nothing that could have been called a toy.

A few moments later, your brain catches up to what you just saw.

And then your body catches up to your brain.

"H-hey, wait- wait, wait, I need you!" you shout as you painfully leap to your feet, stumbling and then hurrying along after the pool toy and not quite registering what you just said. You run awkwardly, not able to move as quickly as you'd like to, the sound of your feet loudly (and almost painfully) slapping against the tiled floor, breaking the near-silence of the space with your footsteps and breathing.

You hurry, possessed by a need so intense it's more than a little odd - hobble-running along, arms near-pinwheeling at your sides like someone who's afraid of falling at any moment (or someone who's forgotten how to walk). Your voice sounds raw, doubtless from what you went through not too long ago, your gaze darting back and forth between where you're going and the water-filled channel to your side as it comes into view, is blocked by a pillar, then comes into view once more, over and over.

You catch sight of a flash of blue tail. Then, more of that same tail - then a sloping little back and a dorsal fin pointing up into the air. The inflatable toy comes to an odd halt, and your heart squeezes as you realise that it's settled down just at the very edge of a cliff. Beyond, the tiled walkways and the channel simply drop away - and then there's nothing. Nothing beyond, nothing to the sides or up, and probably not down. Merely a void, and then something darker than a void. Forever.

Inadvisably, and with a shout, you leap. Your hands grab onto the orca's tail just as it's teetering over the edge and you snatch at it like a man reaching for a life raft. You barely even feel the pain of going belly-down against solid tiles. You pull the inflatable toy back and onto the tiled strip you yourself are on, and then immediately scoot backwards a good dozen or so feet, having precisely zero desire to look over the edge, or to be anywhere near it in case whatever caused your earlier claustrophobic nightmare decides you need a prompt lesson in the meaning of terminal velocity.

Without even really meaning to you begin to cuddle the toy, a little like a frightened child. You certainly feel frightened enough for the comparison to be an apt one, even if you're still buzzing with a sudden surge of adrenaline - nuzzling the inflatable toy's snout up against your shoulder as you wrap your arms around it, the killer whale's fins being squeezed against your sides by your motions as if it's giving you a hug.

In any other situation, you'd probably feel more than a little embarrassed; but the situation you're in is anything but normal - and in all honesty, you really just need something to hold tightly and closely. You suck in a breath through your teeth, take a furtive glance over towards the cliff's edge, scoot a few further feet away - and then close your eyes, shuddering slightly.

You lower your head down against your knees once more, not quite noticing you've curled up into a ball all over again.

You feel your heart pumping inside your chest.

"Are you okay, mister?"

You- yelp isn't the right word. Neither is shriek. You let out a sound and instinctively kick so violently that you nearly send the pooltoy you just rescued sailing all the way over onto the opposite side of the mirrored space you're in. Your heart pounds in your chest as you shoot to your feet, still clutching the orca, blinking as you look left - as you look right.

As you fail to find a single other person. Oh god, are you hallucinating? That's not something you've ever had to deal with before, and if you do, now, inside a place like this-

"Down here!"

You blink. Slowly, you lower your gaze.

You don't find anything underneath you or at your feet.

Your cheeks flush slightly as you look back towards the toy in your hands, as it - undeniably - giggles. Its painted-on eyes blink, its rounded sides heave in and out as though it's breathing. It even moves one of its fins to cover up its snout in an imitation of a human covering their mouth, a gentle, low creak of vinyl accompanying the motion. "What- what the fuck?!" you hiss. "Oh god, I am hallucinating, this isn't-"

"Language!" the pooltoy admonishes you, though in a joking tone. It giggles again, unmistakably grinning up at you as if everything about what's happening makes perfect sense. "Say, mister, what's a hallucinating?"

You blink more. You close your eyes, count to three, and then open them again. The orca remains, not just still existing, not just in place, but staring up at you with a level of kiddy giddiness entirely at odds with both your situation and your surroundings. "Are you real?" you ask, rather bluntly.

Now, it's the rubbery toy's turn to blink. It twists its head from one side to the other, like a confused dog, the motions accompanied by a subtle though unmistakable squeal of stretching vinyl. The grin never leaves its features. "Well, of course I'm real!" it says. "You're pretty silly, aren'tcha, mister?"

"I- am not silly," you protest, cheeks suddenly heating up. You briefly eye the cliff's edge, and then begin to walk away from it, reasoning that it might help set your mind at ease. "But this doesn't make any sense."

"This?"

The question nearly makes you slam to a halt just as soon as you've started walking as the sheer impossibility of everything that you've seen and been through so far emerges to the forefront of your mind like the mental equivalent of a flashbang. "Th- Yeah," you say, a bit more gruffly than you really mean to, huffing. "I meant you talking, but all of this doesn't make sense either. So - what, were you sent by whatever was squeezing me inside of that wall like a worse re-enactment of The Cask of Amontillado as an apology, or did you just pop into existence the moment you came out of the darkness?"

The toy stares, expression going blank for a moment, and all-too evidently not understanding a single word you just said. "Forget about it."

"Okay!" the toy says gleefully, humming as it nuzzles into your shoulder again, wrapping its arms around your sides for real this time. Not quite noticing as you do so, you gently tighten your grip on it as you continue to walk. You continue to walk for a few minutes before, deciding you're probably back to where you were before, you sit down. You gently heft the toy up in front of you, holding it in front of your face - rearing your head back a touch as it tries to reach forwards with its blue snout to boop at you - before you furrow your brow, and try to think of how best to phrase your question.

"How are you talking and how did you get to this place?"

---

(That's it for the preview - you'll have to download to read on from here!)

Posted using PostyBirb