(Don't) Panic

VII - Slaughter Bay

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*trigger warning:

+ suffocation + helplessness + humiliation + vulnerability + excrement + dehuanisation +

*the full warning and list of triggers to be found in part 2

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After a while she marginally realized that she was being detached from the chain but she couldn't bring herself to care about it, the pain from her ear was still fresh and sharp, clouding her mind.

Others bumped into her again, fuelling her pain.

At some point thirst overrode the pain and she opened her eyes to see if she could get some sustenance. To her surprise, she found herself floating in a sphere not unlike the one where she awoke in but much smaller. Men and women were floating around, some still dazed. Some seemed to be sleeping, curled up around themselves. She even saw some fellow human beings going at one another franticly, pounding into their partner without a care of others watching them or the shackles that were still attached to wrists, ankles and necks. From time to time other dazed men and women were injected into the sphere, all dazed, and even some children.

Situated along the middle of the sphere there were some kind of dispensers attached to the sphere. When one of the unconscious drifted close enough for her to grab hold of them, she managed to push herself away from them and into the direction of the dispenser closest to her. There wasn't much to grab onto to keep herself in place but the spout so she clamped her jaws around it. Her tongue instinctively reached forward and once it touched the material a liquid began to flow into her mouth. Unfortunately however, it was most definitely not clean water. It tasted disgusting. She recoiled and coughed and lost contact with the spout, instantly drifting away from the dispenser. She grabbed for it and managed to pull herself towards the spout again. Turning around she gauged the direction and the distance to the next spout, in the hope that whatever was dispensed there would be better.

Travelling through the sphere by propelling herself away from the sphere and other men and women was much more challenging and demanding than she would have expected. When she arrived at the fourth spout only to be greeted by the by now familiar disgusting flavour she was in tears. Her head ached, her mouth was dry, she was completely spent due to travelling to all four dispensers for nothing and above all the entire situation she found herself in. Defeated and succumbing to the need to drink she placed the spout of the forth dispenser in her mouth and stimulated it with her tongue. As the other dispensers it released the fowl tasting liquid into her mouth and she gulped it down regardless. When she had drunk her fill she let herself drift away, curling up with closed eyes and crying.

The next time she awoke it was to harsh bowl movements. She couldn't do anything about what was imminent and to her abject humiliation her body emptied itself of anything inside its bowls convulsively. She writhed in the air, stool and urine leaving her at the same time as the remaining fluids in her stomach which she threw up. She continued heaving long after everything had left her and only when her body had stopped trying to eject everything and she had recovered her senses did she notice that she was slowly turning around herself, drifting inside a bubble made out of her own excrements, vomit and tears. And there was no getting away as she was nowhere near anything that she could use to push herself away from. In the beginning she tried her best not to touch anything in her bubble. As time went on and she underwent several more aftershocks of her body trying to rid itself of everything it contained she grew more and more indifferent to her appearance and her state of cleanliness. She only existed, afraid of when the next wave would hit her and thankful for every moment of peacefulness that her body granted her. She just breathed and stared into emptiness.