Susan’s window breaking was the second most frustrating thing to happen to her today. One moment, she was on one of her folding chairs, struggling to work a gift from a nice Irish man she had met a few years ago, and in the space of a moment her hideaway in one of the penthouse suits of what was apparently a human hotel was filled with the sound of breaking glass, and was lacerated by the hundreds of razor-sharp shards. She didn’t know what broke the window, of course. Susan had learned a long time ago that to [i]not[/i] have two sets of portals wrapping around you during down time was asking for trouble. All around her all she could see was thousands of herself, trailing off to infinity in every cardinal direction through the tall ovular holes. Not having such an array up not only was asking for trouble, but was denying oneself the pleasure of being able to scratch your own back without difficulty, though that particular asset would likely not be useful for the next few hours.

The portals protected her from the glass; the fast-moving shards that would have bitten into her skin had been taken in the front of one portal and out its brother behind her, scarring the already-pockmarked wall with a few more scratches to add to the collection. A few pieces of glass that had bounced off the ceiling had dropped on her head through the top of her almost-dome, but they simply dropped harmlessly into her hair and were removed with an idle hand. The sound had a very hard time reaching her, too: only from the hole in her portals directly above her and through the small gaps between the bottom of the dome and the floor did the sound enter her enclave, and the small apertures served to muffle the sound almost completely.

She heard a muffled ‘thud’ against the wall behind her, and she presumed whatever had decided to interrupt her fiddling with this ‘Tetris’ thing had chosen to fling itself at the out-of-place spatial distortion that it shared the room with. Its exuberance had the expected outcome, and she heard a soft growl and another leap, this time landing cleanly on the glass-covered floor almost too quietly to hear. She had to do something before whatever this brute was broke something else. She had worked hard to decorate her abode with the few human articles she could discern the use for, and she would not let some mindless cretin ruin hours of work.

She bent one set of portals slightly around the middle, forming a gap through which she could peer through. She saw the animal clearly enough; a massive hound, its hair looking more like black needles than matted fur. She did not want it in her room, and she did not want to get anywhere near it. Thankfully, that would not be necessary. She opened a portal outside her window, and another right at the feet of the leaping monster. It was smarter than it looked, and quickly moved itself away from the hole forming in the ground. ‘Drat’. Susan expanded the portal to a comfortable size and began to chase the animal around the room.

It was fast, she would have to give it that. Its four limbs, upon which it sat like a malformed, canine spider, were remarkably agile despite their girth. It hopped from floor to wall to ceiling with remarkable speed, and refused to just go through the portal and plummet to the ground. She tried chasing it for another handful of seconds before she realized her efforts were futile. 

She closed the portal to her side, decreasing the size of the remaining set of portals surrounding her and spinning them around her body in bewitching orbits. The second set of portals led the same place, and with two sets of pursuing dangers the animal was put on edge. She had nearly caught it twice before the beast found an opening. She had been too greedy, pushing  the portals together, trying to catch the animal once and for all, but before doom could envelop it, the monster leaped to the ceiling and pushed itself towards Susan, its gaping maw revealing at least four sets of knife-sharp teeth.

Susan thought quickly, and prepared herself for her worst-case-scenario. She closed her portals as quickly as she could, and with the added control began thinning the orbiting disk into a thin parabola which spiraled around her at blistering speed. The animal’s lunge was predictable, and as she shielded herself with her arms the animal caught on the strand of portal.

The effect, to any unfamiliar observer, would have been anticlimactic. Susan was used to such disappointments, however. A second after she tensed, three thin, slightly curving sections of the animal, lay behind her, spat out by the portal. Already the noxious juices were leaking onto her bedroll. The rest of the animal smashed into her, and she rolled to the side as the rest of the animal impacted the rear end of the twisting strand, throwing yet another set of cross sections at her shins as what was left of the animal crashed into the rear wall, landing on top of the previously-cut slabs. The room smelled terrible, but at least it was no longer full of angry monster. Her clothes had been utterly destroyed, a blue-black dress splattered with red and yellow blood, ruined forever. Weeks of work were ruined, and no doubt she wouldn’t find any peace her, if as she expected these disturbances were pushing the mindless her way. She would need to find another apartment, and fast. She hated being a vagrant, unlike most of her peers. She pocketed the Tetris, grabbed another dress from where it was hanging off a nail on the wall, and set up a portal array to drop her to the ground without incident.

How inconvenient. She almost wished she had just let herself be eaten.