The Escape

Chapter 4 - Tides of Dispair

Their first zone was the one in blue. It was a set of houses the four were familiar with, except it being duplicated a bit, making it larger than the area of the upper world is based off of. The first thing our heroes noticed was that this place was humid...very humid. Along with that, the floor was damp and had the texture of the tiled floor of the girls swim team locker rooms the girls went to in their swimming unit for gym class

"God, there's so much moisture in the air, I bet I could place a glass down and it would be filled with water in a couple hours." Said yuri, already wanting to leave.

"Um yuri, I understand what you mean, but I don't think that's how water molecules work." Monika corrected.

"Well I'm no marine biologist but I don't think that's how rivers work." Replied nat, pointing towards a direction.

The river nat pointed towards had an anomalous property, the stream made the geometry curve downwards. Even stranger was that the various houses seem to follow this rule. When a house curved downward, it seemed to just stretch it out instead of tearing them apart.

"That's very weird. The houses in the water are all squiggly" Sayori noted.

"Now I'm scared of what other rules this place might break..."

Luckily, the stream wasn't too strong. It was more akin to a lazy river at a water park, allowing the girls to wade through, much to natsuki's dismay as she hated getting wet.

"You act just like my cat when we give her a bath." Yuri giggled with a smug look on her face.

"Hmph!"

They continued onwards towards the beacon. As they did though, they found more anomalies, such as waterfalls, even stranger reverse waterfalls, but the strangest was that the water wasn't really water. Thanks to Sayori thinking it was a good idea to taste an unfamiliar liquid, she said that it was salty, not like the ocean, but salty enough to be noticeable.

Occasionally they had to build a raft to traverse across the larger bodies of "water". They built it out of supplies they found in the houses. Speaking of which, they found out that the houses had resources like food and bottled drinks.

"Y'know...*munch* it's really convenient that the author actually put things in the houses." Sayori said as she munched on a bag of chips.

"Yea I guess so...wait what? The hell do you mean by author?!?" Nat questioned

"You know...the author of this fi-"

"Sayori, please stop mentioning things outside of this place" Monika interrupted. "I'm pretty sure he's out of duct tape from fixing the fourth wall now"

Took the words right out of my mouth.

Eventually, after a bit more walking, they arrived at the source of the beacon.

"Hey! Its my house!" Sayori said as she dawned on realization.

Indeed it was. Though unlike the one above it, it was blue like the other buildings around it. It was surrounded with a ring of "water" like the moat of a castle. Scattered across the mostly flat expanse were medium sized holes in the ground among the toe-high water.

As they stepped towards the house, a large figure appeared on top of the house and leaped towards and landed in front of the group.
The figure lacked limbs and was very thick and long with a spiky fin running down it, with its body ending with a cluster of octopus tentacles.

It began to unravel itself, showing the girls its true form as it veered its head upward. Revealing itself to be a cobra. Except unlike most reptiles, this one didn't have scales, instead it's skin was dark brown with small black vertical lines starting from its tail to its hood. The cobra roared to reveal its broken glass-esqe teeth as the girls pulled out their weapons.