Nora woke with a start, limbs jerking, like she always did after one of her linked-up cyborg dreams.  She was preoccupied with thoughts of the many-jointed welding arm she had just ripped off one of the crumbling machines of the maze factory.  She hoped the scavengers didn't disassemble it before she made it back; she had plans to attach it to her shoulder assembly.  Who didn't want a third arm?  And a torch arm would come in pretty handy, both for fighting abominations and for stealing new parts.  Nora pretty much took the lucid dreams for granted at this point; she had no reason to believe that she wasn't going to keep having them.

It actually took her a little while to realize that she wasn't in her own home and bed.  After the initial jerk awake, she'd gone back to lying down with her eyes closed.  It was the television turning on that finally roused her.  Nora barely had the wherewithal to listen to the message, she was instead too busy panicking.  Lurching out of bed, she threw herself at the doors.  The one beside the desk opened easily, revealing a small bathroom.  The one at the foot of the bed was a different story, refusing to budge.  The man on the television finally finished his spiel just as Nora had finished opening drawers on the desk and searching their contents for clues.

She weighed her options, and finally decided that giving the appearance of co-operation might be the best way to get answers and eventually escape.  She quickly changed into the black scrub uniform, stopping to get her lucky bone out of the breast pocket of her pyjamas.  She slipped it into a pocket of the scrubs, then changed her mind and took it out again to fiddle with it.

This time the door opened for her.  She searched her memory for the rest of the instructions.  Green line, yellow line....?  Nora picked the green one and hurried on to whatever bizarre fate awaited her.  

She kinda wished she had one of her skinning knives with her.

[hr]

Bobby should have been woken up by "Shook me All Night Long" blaring out of his tablet's speakers.  He normally woke up obscenely early and went for a jog before work; today, there was no alarm.  He just woke up slowly, relaxed, wondering vaguely why he had the luxury to do so.  He sat up slowly, yawning and stretching, before blinking muzzily and taking in his surroundings.

Well, no wonder his tablet hadn't woken him.  Bobby was clearly not at home.  The room looked like a dormitory, or maybe a hospital.  He climbed out of bed and was just starting to poke and prod at things when a face appeared on the televison.  Seeing nothing better to do, Bobby sat back down on he foot of the bed and watched the entire message.

Well, this was better than he had initially hoped.  Piecing together the message and the surroundings with the state of events in the world at large, Bobby immediately came to the conclusion that he had been kidnapped by some kind of secret government organization.  Probably for experiments.  That was kind of cool.  maybe it had somthing to do with his weird dreams?  [i]Shit, were those dreams real?[/i]  Maybe he had really been turning into that... goat monster thing... and rampaging through the countryside, like a werewolf.  Wasn't that what werewolves always said in movies?  That they thought they were just dreaming?  Bobby hadn't woken up covered in blood and chicken feathers or anything, but that theory made as much sense as anything.

"Awesome," he said out loud as he pulled on one of the white scrub sets over the shorts he had been sleeping in.  When he followed the green line tot the elevator, he was whistling.