[center][h1][color=8882be]Sig[/color][/h1][/center]

"I'm Joel, by the way," said the girl with the ring on her neck. Sig made to introduce himself but was quickly drowned out by another body entering the room. Then, another. It was quickly becoming crowded in the stretcher bay, each new face sharing qualities with the last, looking beaten, tired. Each of them had an aura of wrongness, something Sig could only compare to a computer glitch, as if the very air around them was broken. He shook his head. Being critically injured made everything weird, that was all.

It was true, it seemed - everyone in the room had been clinically deceased at some point very recent to that day. He thought it was odd, putting everyone in the same room, but he recalled seeing that sort of thing on the internet in the past. Groups of people who had near-death experiences, coming back as different people, some claiming to have visions or see spirits and stuff like that.

One of the other patients spoke, breaking Sig from his thoughts. "What is this," she said. "A part of the Make-A-Wish foundation?" The girl was blonde, with several piercings around her face, looking very punk-rock. Sig barked a tense laugh at her quip.

A pressure on his ears suddenly set them to ringing. An odd sensation crept upon his skin. He realized all movement in the air had stopped, and everything was silent, like a mute button was pressed on life.

He then realized he couldn't breathe.

Sig sat up in bed, mouth agape, desperate for air, clinging to the bed's railing as he tried everything to get his lungs to work. Despite all his efforts, his breath only left his throat in a muffled wheeze, unable to find its way back in. His veins surged with adrenaline. His grip on the railing crested and its steel bars bent like rubber.

He felt a strange sensation flood from his hand. The lights in the room began to flicker. He watched the screens on the vital monitors burn out one after another. Then, all the lightbulbs shattered silently, raining glass and darkness into the room below.

Sig threw himself out of bed, his legs giving out beneath him as he fell to his hands and knees. He scrambled for a way out, a way to get air. Something. Anything.