[i]Breathe. Breathe. [b]Breathe![/b][/i]

Their breath caught in their throat. How had they forgotten how to [i]breathe[/i]? Their eyes struggled to open. The oppressive lighting had been enough when their head wasn't swimming, but now it was blinding. Kas brought their hands to their head and pressed at their temples, anything to help ground themselves. How'd they gotten here? Where were they? They hazarded a peek, the pain of the light drawing a sharp exasperated hiss that thankfully proved to them that they did know how to breathe. It was just the drugs scrambling their head.

[i]Drugs?[/i]

Right. Drugs. Someone had doped them up when they came to earlier. [i]But... why?[/i] it clicked an instant later; probably on account of Kas implying they could probably bite off their own tongue and choke themselves to death, taking down the shuttle if it didn't bring them back home. [i]Some people. No sense of humour.[/i] Kas shook their head, as if it would help wring out the still present haze surrounding them. All it achieved was a new height of vertigo that resulted in a pool of bile on the floor beside them. [i]New plan.[/i]

Kas groped at their ankles as pieces began to settle into place. They weren't cuffed anymore. And... if they could reach their ankles this easily then... Kas stretched their arms out, confirming to themselves that they were, in fact, uncuffed everywhere. Kas's eyes fluttered in a daring attempt to try and use more than one sense, but that just dragged the vertigo back to the surface and that stab of pain through their skull. They'd been drugged this heavily once before when they broke their arm and had to get it set as a child. That memory of waking up was still fresh even all these years later. They'd forgotten how to breathe as they slithered out of the drug-induced haze and could only silently scream as their body refused to listen to their struggles. In truth, they hadn't forgotten how to breathe. They were breathing just fine. Screaming even better. Turned out Kas just has a high sensitivity to sedatives.

With that in mind, they went back to forcing themselves to recuperate. There was no way they had just been left to their own devices once the shuttle got to whatever new hell was supposed to be awaiting them. That meant something was wrong. But if something was wrong, why was construction being done right outside of the pod? That [b]thud thud thud[/b] over and over. Like a hammer against metal again and again. Even though Kas's scrambled senses the sound was overwhelming. They kept at trying to force themselves to investigate. On hands and knees they tried crawling, reorienting themselves every time they ran into something or started to get farther away from the thudding. Their hand landed in something warm and viscous. It stuck to them and as they tried to help themselves up they found more of that stickiness with a misplaced step. "Är det..." they muttered, twisting their ankle, smearing their foot through the mess until it pressed into something coarse. Some kind of linen. Linen with fading warmth beneath it.

Their blood went cold. [i]Something's wrong,[/i] echoed in their head. Did the pod crash into the station? Was that a cause of the thudding? Kas stumbled on shaky legs, hugging the wall of the pod, inching closer and closer to the thuds. They threw another arm over their eyes, trying to peak out beneath it. It was all a blur, silhouettes and smears of blending grays. But they were getting close to the exit. "Hej?" they hazarded, their voice a croak, their throat dry and burning.

Out of the pod there were shapes Kas had to assume were people. Kas tried to say something again, but there was nothing this time. Just a faint hiss that felt drowned out by the thuds. They tried to get closer. Maybe these people could help. [i]Maybe...[/i] Things began to focus in, shapes and sounds growing sharper. The thuds turned to cracks. The silhouettes turned to people intent on what was ahead of them. That source of the sharp cracks that made Kas's ears ache and their head throb the firearms clenched in the hands of these people. They hadn't noticed Kas yet coming up from behind them. Perhaps they had assumed everyone in Kas's pod had been accounted for. Kas made sure to alert them to their mistake when they tried to make a break away from the men and their knees buckled, sending them sprawling out onto the cold metallic floor of the launch bay with a thud and a hiss of "Fokk!"