Chapter Text
Dark. The place barely looked real. Maybe it wasn’t - god, they really prayed it wasn’t.
Mirabelle sat up, and almost instantly felt the sting of reality. Their bones ached. Their head rang, and the sight of their own brother, their own TWIN BROTHER, slumped over his desk with not a single sign of life from him was burned into their retinas. Oh, she wished she could scream. She nearly did, had it not been for the sudden sound of footsteps just meters away. She had to move.
She shot to her feet, not daring to look back as she turned tail and ran. Despite it feeling like she was barefoot, it still sounded like she made more noise than she should’ve ever made. The footsteps quickened behind her. Some kind of garbled sound rang from the end of the concrete hallway, something between a laugh and a messed up .mp3 file.
Her feet burned as she turned the corner with a skid, before ducking behind a nearby box. Or well, a poorly textured cube that LOOKED like a box. As she sat down, hearing the thing’s footsteps slow to a patrol as it passed her, she finally managed to focus on the strange blurry thing atop her vision. Some kind of timer, currently at thirty seconds. She wasn’t much for hide and seek, but if anything it looked like that’s what she had to do. At least until that timer was gone.
20 seconds.
The thing passed by her again.
14 seconds.
Its footsteps came to a halt. Just a foot away from her hiding spot.
8 seconds.
She barely realized it was leaning right over her. She didn’t want to know what hit the ground where she once was, but it didn’t sound like the normal hand the strange bear creature had.
4 seconds.
She couldn’t dodge the next hand, the one that felt all too real and all too cold as it clasped around her arm and yanked her into the air.
2 seconds.
It looked like the weird bear she’d seen her brother looking at in that game he’d...been playing. Before he...
Times up!
The beeping rang through the hallway, abnormally clear despite what would’ve been the echo.
The bear's grin widened. And then, she was somewhere else somewhere...better, she supposed.