Beastars: A Steep Fall From Light

Prelude: A New World of Shadows

Suzume woke up in her bed. She stared up at her ceiling for a good five minutes, as she normally did when waking from a dream. After that, she took a few deep breaths into her lungs to start the day. Her heart pumped the oxygenated blood through her body and she felt a stretch coming on. Her nose wriggled, which confirmed the action was coming. She inhaled deeply and yawned as her limbs pushed out as far as they could.

That was when she realized her arms and legs were splayed out so her body was in a star shape. Odd. But then again, the body did odd things in its sleep. Especially when the sleeper was affected from sleepwalking. She tried to draw her arms and legs in, but found they were restrained as something held them back. She looked to see her ankles and wrists were tied to bedposts that belonged to a bed which wasn't hers. Had she had that much to drink last night? No. She remembered distinctly she had been the designated driver and had been able to take her friends home safely. She also remembered falling asleep in her own bed undisturbed. Her ear twitched. Now she was scared.

As her senses became undulled she smelled cigarette smoke, which was another sign that she was not in her own home. She didn't smoke. The light streamed in from the only window in the room, which she now saw was small, with beige paint peeling from cinder block walls. Definitely not her apartment, which had the same repeating cherry blossom design against the teal background. She heard rain falling outside as the water pelted the window pain. There wasn't the sound of cars on the road outside, which helped her get a sense of where she might be. Nowhere good. The only place in the city unreachable by cars was in The Drusk, the place where the Back Alley Market used to stand before being torn down. The city had been trying to rebuild the area into residential buildings, but no one was comfortable living in the graveyard of that place. As such, it became a sort of haven for the homeless and less fortunate.

She heard something else over the sounds of the rain. She heard a keyboard typing. Her heart froze as she came to the realization she wasn't alone. She slowly turned her head towards the sound and saw a figure dressed completely in black, sitting at a desk and typing into a heavy looking laptop. They had on black sneakers that wrapped around their ankles and draped around the top of them were the bottoms of their pants. They wore a black hoodie, with the hood pulled up over their head. Everything they wore shaped out their slim body type. Their tail was hanging limp through the back of the seat they sat in, the fur a dark blonde color. The length of the tail made her assume that they were a wolf. And she was a hare. She started to see even more of her predicament.

She tugged at the rope binding her to the rickety bed, trying to free herself.

"If you could do your best not to struggle," the figure said, pausing in his typing. "It ruins the quality of the meat and my clients are very picky."

Their voice was muffled like they were wearing a mask. They continued with their typing. She went back to trying to free herself, pulling her mouth closer to one of her wrists to chew through the rope. When she couldn't reach she tried the other one. She couldn't reach that one either, so she tried using the power in her legs to snap the bindings around her ankles free. Then she could at least defend herself. No one wanted to get kicked in the stomach by a hare. After kangaroos and horses, they had some of the strongest kicks. She jerked her left leg and the bed lurched across the floor, grinding metal on stone.

The hooded animal jumped up from his computer, kicking the chair backwards and onto the dirty carpet with its own thud. The room was so small he practically stepped across it and held her throat in a gloved hand. She felt his claws slide through the fabric fingertips like a feline's and press into her skin. Then she looked up to his face and saw he was wearing a gas mask. Black, like the rest of his outfit. It covered his entire face and acted as a muzzle around his snout. Which pointed away from a canine, as they couldn't talk with such devices on. He stared out at her from within through two separate eye holes. The shadows caused from the blinds over the window prevented her from seeing them completely. All she saw as the light reflected off of them.