1 – Birth by Glass

Floating in cold, wet nothingness. Unable to feel, unable to think.

Then came a vibration, a sound that roused her into consciousness.

Glass cracking. Crack. Crack. Snap.

A viscous flood, ripping her half-conscious self into the reality of a shard-covered marble floor.

The pain of impact jolted her into awareness, and she began coughing violently to clear her lungs. Emerald-green liquid still dripping from her nose and mouth, she instinctively reached for one of the narrower glass shards.

“So cold… So hungry...” she thought as she struggled to stand. Bundles of sodden brown hair reached down to her knees, slithering across her bare skin like the tendrils of some abyssal monstrosity. She took her first real breaths, strands of silvery fog escaping with each exhalation. Her eyes drifted across the mosaic of glass spread out before her, a pair of silver eyes staring back at her. She turned to get a better look at her own reflection on the inside of the tank she was floating in only moments prior. A muscular physique, a sharp angled face, and strangely two-toned hair, silvery-white on top and rusty-brown below a certain point. “It could be worse,” a foreign thought sparked in her head.

The sound of bare feet on marble echoed as she began walking, taking in her surroundings, leaving dry spots in the emerald liquid wherever she stepped. Her mind flooded with the feeling of recognition, and yet she didn’t know what she was looking at or where she was. There were dozens of glass tanks up against the wall, identical to hers, with copper pipes snaking from their bases into the floor. Most of them were broken, with tumorous masses of flesh and bone lying before them. The right wall of the chamber was a towering mess of metal pipes, valves and dials, snaking into the floor and ceiling both.

Although she felt curiosity, something in the very back of her mind told her to get out of here, that this place was doomed. Only… There was nothing more than a solid wall, lined with bizarre machinery to her right. She saw a doorway on the far end of the chamber to her left, though it was barely a speck from this far away. “No choice, I guess,” she thought and began walking down the length of the room, taking care not to step on a shard of glass.

Her gaze darted all around as she made her way toward the doorway, a palpable tension ever-present and intensifying with every step she took towards the exit. Gleams of pale-white light reflected off the polished floor and the shards that lay upon it, yet strangely, the emerald liquid that once filled the tubes gave no reflection. Even more up-close, the lumps of flesh that lay in front of the tanks were completely indistinguishable - giant teratomas by any other name. Some had visible eyes and mouths, or even entire limbs sticking out of the main mass. The urge to break into a sprint had become almost overwhelming, but she kept herself calm by counting the tanks as she passed them.

“Thirty-four. Thirty-five. Thirty s-”

Squelch. A tumor-thing had used its sole arm to move itself into her path and grab her calf, squeezing with its seven distended, nailless fingers. Its eleven eyes converged to stare at what it had grabbed, moving up her form with a leery gaze while a pair of toothy mouths turned to perverse grins. At that moment, she knew what she’d need the shank for.

She stabbed straight down, into the creature’s eyes. Glass sank into flesh, tears mixed with ocular fluid spilled onto her fingers, atonal screeching and the chattering of teeth filled her ears. A sharp yank to the right. Guts and blood spilled from the wound, a half-formed ribcage forcing its way out like the unfolding teeth of a bear trap. A sudden halt to the noise, the creature’s grip tightening and then going limp. Still angered, she stomped on the thing and malformed guts burst from the eviscerated skin-sack, its single intact eye popping out of the socket.

A new smell rose as the creature dissolved into more green liquid, skin and soft tissues boiling away, thick ropes of green Fog escaping from the roiling mass to screech-like whistling. It smelled… Herbal. Identical to the emerald liquid. Though some green fluid spilled out of the melting carcass, much of it was being… Absorbed, directly through the skin of her leg. With every passing moment, more of the flesh-blob’s biomass melted away and entered into her body, and with every passing moment, more of her leg turned from pallid-white to light brown, silvery pathways in her skin becoming visible thanks to the contrast. She felt hunger and weakness fading, strength and limberness filling her as if she had just woken from a restful sleep.

The flesh, skin, and viscera were gone by this point, leaving only cartilage, bones, and teeth sitting in what little liquid remained. Slowly, ever so slowly, even these began boiling and melting, the herbal smell of green Fog mixing in with the stench of burning bone and keratin. Even still she kept an eye out on the other tumor-things, and after she gave it a bit of thought, it did make sense.

“I came out of a tank that was full of Green, and so did these things…” she pondered, turning her eyes on the nearest flesh-thing. “They melt back into Green after death, yet I absorb it… Therefore-”

Her train of thought was knocked off its rails when the creature she had her eyes on started twitching and gurgling, one of its mouths gaping wide as green spilled out of it and an unnaturally long leg emerged. Soon lurching, gurgling noise echoed throughout the chamber as one after another more of the tumor-things came alive, some dragging themselves across the floor towards her and some throwing their entire mass across the slick floor, screeching every time they landed on a shard of glass.

“How many?” she wondered, counting the moving blobs. Eleven so far, out of forty-five in total. Already she felt the slam of a foot next to hers, the mouth-legged tumor-thing trying to drag itself close enough to bite with one of its other mouths. She grabbed its leg and lifted it up, gutting the creature while it whipped about like a hooked fish. Glass cutting through flesh and cartilage, eyeballs popping and guts spilling, screeching that ended as abruptly as it began. It splashed into the floor and instantly began melting when she let go.