Undone

Prologue

It's around 1 o'clock, maybe 1:30 in the morning.

The world surrounding the lab is completely asleep, with even the most persistent of night owls having turned in for the night– all of them but Test Tube.

The only noises in the room are the sound of the overworked ventilation, disinfectant against metal, and the faint sound of Test tube's breathing– although if you strained your ears you could barely hear the sounds of the night outside.

Test Tube was busy sterilizing her lab to prep it for her next somewhat-legal experiment of the night, her sleeves rolled up to avoid them getting wet. She had black rubber gloves instead to avoid injuring her hands– with all the chemicals she messed with, she would get a deep chemical burn if she didn't have a little caution– even with her immunity to most acids taken into account.

There's a sound that echoes through her lab, a sort of metal-on-metal sound, like someone had just broken a door in her lab. Her head whips toward the direction of the noise almost immediately– that better not be who she thought it was!

Test Tube furrows her brows and walks to the door to the main room in her lab, her Lazer gun in tow.

Putting her ear to the door, she hears nothing but the slight buzz of the ventilation circulating the air in her small laboratory.

Test Tube frowns in slight confusion and slowly opens the door a crack, peeking through it.

Nobody was there.

("Something must've fallen") She thinks.

She swings open the door all the way and frowns some more. Everything was in order. So then where did that noise come from?

Her eyes land on the entrance to her lab– the door was wide open– broken, actually.

Test Tube grits her teeth, pissed as she walks to the door. Another sound echoes through the lab–

–she looks in the direction it came from and her eyes widen–

-she fumbles for her gun, but it's too late as her eyelids shut and she collapses on the floor.

Test Tube's limp body & gun is teleported away, her glasses being the only proof that anything worrying might've happened there.

The chirping of birds signaled the beginning of the day for the contestants of Inanimate Insanity– Lightbulb included.

She's (one of) the first ones up, running her hands through her thick coils as if the action was a proper replacement for a comb as she went through her morning routine as well as someone as disorganized as she could.

As she ties the rubber band around her untamed knotty hair Fan rushes up to her, looking very uncomfortable.

"Lightbulb!" She shouts before she could even reach the girl.

"Paper!" Lightbulb shouts back.

"Have you seen TestTube at all today?"

"Nope." She shakes her head, pulling her hand away from her hair and wincing as a few strands get tied to her hand, pulling on her scalp. "Why'd you ask?"

"She won't reply to any of my texts! And nobody has seen her at all since last night! Like None! At all!"

"Okay?"

"How do you NOT SEE THE PROBLEM WITH THIS?!" She screams, panicked. Her voice cracks halfway through and turns into an awkward whisper-shout. "What if she got kidnapped or died, or her lab exploded and she died and NOBODY KNOWS or she's in BIG DANGER?!"

Lightbulb shrugs, chewing on a nearby stick just for fun.

"She's probably not– I mean, this is Testy we're talking about, she wouldn't let herself get hurt like that! She's amazing." Lightbulb shrugs. "She's probably snoring in her lab or something. Dunno."

Then again, she did want to see their girlfriend today... "Heyyy... why don't we go look for her?"

Fan doesn't get to respond as Lightbulb bolts to the woods.

The two run toward the vending machine that hid Test Tubes' ex-secret lab Lightbulb quickly presses the water & dr. fizz buttons on the vending machine, snagging a dr. fizz before she's pulled into the lab with Fan in tow.

Lightbulb peeks into the first room of the lab, finding nobody.

She turns to Fan, unable to mask her discomfort "...Nobodys in here." Despite the eerie silence of the lab discouraging them both, eventually, they walk into the room, uncomfortable. Usually, TestTube was either up working on/in her lab, or sleeping after a draining all-nighter. She clearly wasn't working, since there weren't any tell-tale noises of metal hitting metal, or liquids boiling– and considering how loudly Test Tube could snore she probably wasn't asleep either...

...but she wasn't on completion grounds either– and apparently, nobody had seen her since last night!

She probably hadn't packed up and left either, since all the lights in her lab were still on. Even through the closed metal door leading deeper into the lab, Lightbulb could see Test Tube had cleaning materials out.

Lightbulb keeps walking forward when suddenly–

*crack!*

–The sound of glass cracking echoes throughout the room.

Lightbulb and Fan look down to see what she stepped on– to their absolute horror, they find Testtubes circular glasses laying on the floor, the glass shattered from Lightbulb's black canvases crushing it.

At the sight of the object it finally registers in Lightbulb's mind that Fan is right.

Something bad happened here.

Something bad happened to Testtube.

Something very, very bad.

[ Undone ]