[b]Virginia[/b]

Things were too loud for Virginia’s sensitive ears. Where were her caretakers? Her cub’s murderers? Her paws set heavily upon red linoleum, a constant sound beneath the screaming, the thud-gallop of others escaping as she was. No—escaping was too strong a word. She was meandering. Already, the red doors of any exits were passing by as she thumped along, nose twitching and pointing her in the direction of something that smelled like a science lab. Behind crisp, half-broken white doors there resided a room entirely coated in a layer of broken glass and lightly smoking chemicals. A few spare rivers of color escaped when she shoved open the door, prompting her to stop and lick them up with a passing swipe.

The burning touched her tongue, familiar, comforting. She grunted through the cacophony only a hallway down, what sounded like the screeching of a rodent and the groans of several of the Gut Tasters. She caught the smell of one of them, an unfamiliar, dead scent like that of old meat, and as she lifted her head from her feast of the lab, several were grunting and shuffling behind her, blocking the doorway. With a flip of her paw, two of them crashed into the other, and the third bit down into the fur at her elbow. She made a moaning grunt of annoyance, leaning down onto her front paws again and biting into the Gut Taster’s head. A disgusting, meaty taste burst into her mouth, and she spit out a wad of scarlet, groaning and shoving the bodies away in disgust before returning to the significantly more important task of slurping up that little puddle of blue stuff.

[b]Jumper[/b]

Fear. The lights sat bright, sparking and harming little Jumper’s eyes. He darted from one direction to another, heart racing away, dodging through legs and bodies and corridors. Where was Mother? Hurt? Dead, dead, dead. He skid into stopping before a set of red doors. What did the sign say? E-X-I-T? It was different from the other doors, it had to lead to somewhere away from the ugly humans and scared animals. With a kick, the door swung open, letting him bounce through and out into a narrow hallway. Another set of doors awaited him at the very end, and in seconds his legs pumped a few paces, launching him into icy-frightening noises, open air, darkness. Stricken with a sudden abject horror, he looked into the ceiling. The ceiling! What a room! There were no walls, no ceiling, nothing to keep him in! Where was he? Where were the rooms? Tall, grey-mirror structures greeted his shaking form in the red, smoggy distance like a giant greets a beetle beneath its hoof.

Panting, braying and swiping his tail back and forth, he wobbled forward like a puppet, stopping to lean heavily against a broken hunk of concrete, trying to avoid looking up into the infinite, mottled ceiling. He closed his eyes and thought of Mother. Distant now, crumpled, braying for him to stop where the others would not. He fell to his knees and curled inward, still unstable, muscles and bone, quivering.