Down Under

Hi, this is one of my first books. Kind of cheesy, but take it easy on me!

Miranda woke drowsily to the sound of an erratic and irritating beeping noise. She looked around. There were horrible mint green curtains around her, and a little chrome machine beside her making the beep. She slapped it, but it didn't stop.

Whatever. Somebody walked in, a somebody wearing mint green (again) scrubs and gloves. Ugh, what a horrible colour. They stuck little sticky adhesive patches to her temples, palms, feet, chest, arms, forehead, almost everywhere. Miranda traced the wires coming out of the sticky adhesive to the bizarre machine. Were they going to electrocute her?

She definitely had all of her memories intact, as well as her body, so that was OK. The person in scrubs pressed a red button on the beeping machine. Nothing major happened, surprisingly. The red button here didn't seem to be the D-Day detonator. Then the person pressed a small white button beside it, and Miranda went numb. The muted, dazed feeling seeped into her mind, and she could feel herself blacking out.

At least these people aren't cliched, she thought, and went unconscious.

Click.

Demetrius woke up standing second to the left in a line of people. He stumbled forwards; it felt like something had been crushing every individual part of his body to death.

Where was he? Who were these people? Who was he?

Whirr...

The memories came rushing into his head, and he could answer his questions. He was...okay, he couldn't answer that one. The other people were, in linear order, Sebastian, him, Lysander, Jessica, Portia, and Miranda. He remembered them from "training".

“Wow...this isn't what I expected.”

“D'you think there's food?”

“How'd we get here?”

Someone clapped their hands. Portia. She was standing on a rock to compensate for her lack in height.

"Guys, we need to find food and water. Jessica, you look for a river or lake with Lysander. Sebastien, look for some sort of food, plants, fruits, whatever. Miranda, you join him. Demetrius, you're coming with me to explore the land. Are we clear?"

Portia strode through the tall grass quickly, Demetrius on her heels. She had noticed, after a while, that the whole place seemed to be inside of a huge metal dome. Instead of one big lights, blinding fluorescent lights were arranged in a grid across the metallic sky. Portia noticed panels of metal, about the squared area of sixteen lights. The place looked almost like someone had jammed the roof of a warehouse down on some innocent patch of deserted countryside. That theory would work...if there were a few animals, bugs, or birds. Also, how would they get enough vitamin D from the fluorescent lights? 

She took a breath in, and eased her thoughts from hyper drive, closing her eyes. Opening them again, Portia looked to the side, and saw a hill. They could look out over the area they were in from a higher viewing point. 

"See the hill?" she said, pointing at her discovery. A grunt in reply signalled that Dem had heard, and she began to run. 

Sebastien looked at the grass, while Miranda forayed through the forest they had collided with. It was different, for sure, but not out of the ordinary. The blade seemed to be made to cut, since the sides of the blade were very sharp, and there were scales running down the leaf, giving it a waxy sheen. 

There. Right above Sebastien's head, there was a flying creature of some kind. It had feathers, black ones, and brilliant blue eyes. The thing had a rodent's nose, paired with the form of an avian. The thing had wings, but they were thinner, and stretched farther back along the creature's body. It flew down to Sebastien, at his head level. Another darted down, and closer. They were emitting an odd whistling sound. He wondered if this was their mating call, since there appeared to be no mouth or beak on the creatures. The flying animals were making the sound with their noses. They were sniffing him! 

Slowly, Sebastien stood up and held out his dirty hands for the thing to land in, if they were anything like birds. The first one cocked it's head to the side, as if bemused. They seemed very intelligent, so Sebastien didn't doubt it. It flew towards his hands, and sniffed them vigorously. 

Then, as if somebody hand yanked them from his reality, the things were gone. 

They look like flying rats, Sebastien thought, and laughed to himself. 

"SEBASTIEN! Get over here!" Miranda shouted. 

"OKAY!" he yelled back. The two of them played a game of marco polo (it's a simile), using the calls of "Where?" and "Here!", and Sebastien trying to find Miranda. Finally, he pulled two trees apart, and saw Miranda crouched in front of a black mass. 

"Are you hurt?" he gasped, weary from running. 

"Do I sound hurt? Look at this. I was looking for berries and that stuff, and then I almost tripped over this sucker. Look at the size of it."

The thing lying on the leaf-strewn ground was black and oily. The skin looked like wet leather, thin strips of it stretched over a bony frame. The body seemed to have two feet, a long frame that leaned forwards, with two clawed arms, and a head covered with more black tissue that could've been hair. The creepiest part was that it was bleeding thick, clear blood. 

Jessica remembered running. She used to do the 200-meter sprints at her old middle school, coming in third or second. A sensation struck her, as momentum whipped her hair back, and her feet pounded rhythmically on the ground. It was a sort of exhilaration, as if she was outrunning a storm. She was making her way through a thin forest, where she could see the sky at the other end. Something was wrong, dreadfully wrong. Jessica stopped, and let what she was seeing flood into her brain. She was standing at the edge of a cliff. The type of cliff she thought of when a kid drowned themselves, or the type heroes and heroines alike would dangle off of while their enemy kicked at their fingers. Except this cliff seemed to have no bottom.

"But that's impossible, unless we're cantilevered on some object smaller than this...which is magically floating? Or this could be some sort of weird island. This is so bizarre."

Jessica ran back through the forest, where Lysander was sitting on the grass of the field, waiting.

"Did you find any water?" he asked, flicking aside a blade of grass. Jessica shook her head. 

"There's this cliff, and it's either really steep, or has no bottom at all. It's crazy."

"We should go tell the other people."

"Did we even organize a place to meet? And it's not as if we have watches or something."

"Whatever."

The hill had an amazing view over the prison. Portia noticed that the whole place was covered by this dome. But the proportions didn't seem...right. The bottom of the dome looked a lot farther away than the edge of the land. It was almost as if there was a gap, like a cliff or something. 

"Look at this. There are these black spots over at the edge of the forest. They look almost like, well, sheep or some sort of herd." Demitrius noted, shaking Portia's shoulder. 

"Yeah. They're going into the forest. Maybe there's food or something."

"Probably. I pity the prey. They move pretty fast."

"Can you stop that?" Miranda snapped. "It's really annoying."

Sebastien looked over at Miranda. "Doing what?"

"Like rustling the leaves or something."

"I'm not rustling the leaves. I'm not doing anything."

Miranda threw her hands up. "This is like a horror movie or something. Theres probably some local fauna or something." 

Her eyes slid over to the beast lying on the ground, avoiding the bloody maw, with it's two thich incisors. Sebastien followed her gaze, and made a face. 

"It's probably likely that there are more of them. You think we should go somewhere out in the open?"

"That's a fabulous idea. I--"

Miranda stopped talking. The things were surrounding them.