Breaking Point

Taking a Tumble

Ringing.

The whole world is ringing, the sheer volume of it drowning out all else. There is nothing but high-pitched white noise. If there is more than noise, then I can't see it. It's too dark. Was there ever anything else? There must have been, somewhere.. But, where? Where am I? How did I.. what.. happened..

Piper's eyes gradually opened for what felt like the first time in hours, her face shaded by a leafy canopy crisscrossed with square mesh above her. Although she still felt delirious from.. something, her limbs seemed to wake up just fine as they laboriously dragged Piper's limp body up into a seated position.

Piper's head lagged a bit behind the rest of her body, her skull hanging like a sack of potatoes against her spine while the rest of her back straightened out. With a sigh, Piper tried tilting her head to look straight forward, but had to catch her face in her palms as a wave of vertigo nearly sent her straight back down. Whatever had been slamming against the bells now gradually fading from her ears now seemed to be pounding against her skull and body, as tinnitus was replaced with throbbing pain that coursed through her head and carried down through her limbs. Piper groaned in pain and discomfort, but the same invisible force that'd taken hold of her limbs told her that she needed to take note of her condition. Whatever happened must've been pretty bad, especially considering that she didn't remember dozing off under a tree in such an apparently violent way.

In an attempt to pull her head out of the clouds, Piper started through a few basic grounding questions. She knew that her name was Piper Point, she turned 29 on June 1st, and that she was on some sort of mission. She remembered being special ops agent, and had a vague feeling that her current condition had something to do with her work.

Speaking of her condition, Piper was beginning to feel present enough to take an honest look at her surroundings, though this just made more questions. The mesh that she'd seen above her was part of a cage that had evidently been through quite the battle. The bars were dinged and scratched with some squares having kinks in them, and what was meant to be the solid black floor of the enclosure instead formed the right wall. Evidently, something had given Piper's cage a beating, and she'd been taken along for the ride before it came to rest on its side.

Or, that's what she would have thought if it made a lick of sense. What country was she deployed in where prisoners of war were captured in containers like these? If she had been on a mission before going dark, there was no way that her allies were the ones that put her here. Even so, what in the world would be big enough to do such damage to a steel cage this large? The thing could hold a whole platoon at least, yet it had to have rolled to get to its current state.

Then, Piper dared to look at eye level.

Thick blades of head-height grass stuck up from the ground a few paces away from her position, with trodden dirt encompassing the rest of the ground beneath the cage. To Piper's left, the trunk of a monolithically large tree melded up from the soil to hold the metropolis-sized crown of leaves she'd seen earlier above her steel prison. But all of that was nothing by comparison to the rows of impossibly gargantuan houses lining the street that she thankfully hadn't landed on, instead placing her under a tree in one of these houses' yards. The house itself looked to be miles away, though it still took up her full line of sight directly in front of her and was probably just a few seconds' walk to a normal-sized.. person..

The acrid scent of exhaust stung at Piper's nostrils has she began to hyperventilate, panic growing even as she stayed pathetically small. The pained throbbing in her head quickened its pace as sweat started to bead on her face, eyes widening at the superfortress of a home before her while vertigo once again threatened to knock her down. It's as if the mounting fear formed a weight on her chest, crushing her lungs, making it impossible to breathe. Piper wasn't even sure what specifically she was afraid of, she just knew that she.. That she..