Chapter Text
The first thing Sylvie saw when he woke up was that he was in the dark, and unlike his expectation of how Molly’s room would look when he work up, it looked pretty industrial. For a moment he patted around trying to find his glasses, only to realize they were already on his face. He blinked and scanned the area, trying to further determine his location and assess the situation. He could have sworn he was at Molly’s place when he went to sleep. Now though, he was very much not at Molly’s place, to an alarming degree in fact. As his vision came back to him, he deduced that he was in rafters of a building. He squinted, trying to see what little he could through the darkness and mumbled to himself. “Maybe this is Molly’s attic or something, ugh why does my epithet always makes me sleepwalk when I sleep in new places?” Though, he quickly realized this was very much not in fact Molly’s attic when he found a ledge with a light source and peered out over it. Almost as quickly as he looked out over it however, Sylvie pulled himself back up, reeling from the sheer distance between himself and the ground and started to feel a little dizzy from the effect, though from his vision or from his quickly setting in anxiety, however, he wasn’t sure which was the cause of this rapid onset ailment. Logically he knew it was only a thirty foot distance at most, but in his current state it felt more like a hundred feet and he was rapidly debating with himself the prospect of staying in that exact spot forever, terrified of the thought of even attempting to figure out how to make his way down to the ground.
Steadying his breath and attempting to calm his racing mind, Sylvie leaned back over and tried again, a series of bright green and purple puzzle piece floor mats and some relatively tall metal play structures in neon colors were visible throughout the dark warehouse like room. Beginning to panic again, he attempted to stand up this to see if he could find a staircase down to the main floor, but ended up lightly hitting his head on the low ceiling. He cursed under his breath, or at least as much cursing as a 15 year old generally knows, which essentially began and ended with the word ‘stupid’. Rubbing his head where it made contact with the ceiling, he began to glance around for alternative light sources. Finding this to be a fruitless endeavor however, he opted to just crawl along the ledge and hope for a staircase or something down to the main floor.
Much to Sylvie’s dismay, a staircase was beginning to seem like an increasingly unlikely possibility after a few moments of crawling around the rafters and narrowly avoiding falling off, however, one of the tall play structures could have potential to help him get down from the increasingly alarming height. From his view it looked to be about a ten foot fall onto the tallest of the three main structures, although He wasn’t exactly thrilled with the thought of getting down to the structure from the rafters by that particular method, much less the prospect of even being in such a childish, not to mention creepingly eerie place alone, however, he decided he’d much rather be down there than spend another minute crawling around and getting cobwebs in his hair. He eyed the lime green platform and carefully climbed down the side. He made an attempt to land gracefully, though he ended up looking more like a baby duckling attempting to fly for the first time than the graceful swanlike landing he envisioned as he landed on the soft mat with a thud.
Quickly shaking off his rough landing, he got up and dusted himself off and began to scan the walls of the warehouse-like building for a way out. “Okay, every building has some kind of exit, now the only question is where could it be…” As he pondered the thought, he failed to notice a soft mechanical whirring in the background. “Maybe I need to be on the ground to find it…” Saying this, his eyes darted around for a way to climb down from the platform, upon assessing the situation he figured the rope ladder he saw from up in the rafters was still an option and almost began to climb down it. He quickly found though that only the frayed ends of the rope ladder remained attached to the structure and the majority of it was now splayed out on the floor nearly twenty feet below him. Sighing grumpily, he resigned himself to going down the slide to get to the ground floor. “How undignified! I’m a doctor! Someone of my standing shouldn’t have to be doing something this demeaning!” Despite his numerous complaints, he went down the slide and even though he would never admit it, had just a tiny bit of fun doing it.
The slide deposited Sylvie in a multicolored maze of hanging pool noodle-like objects. As he began to make his way through them, narrowly missing being smacked in the face numerous times, he heard a whirring sound, which he did not fail to notice this time. He looked out over the shadowy indoor playground, looking for the source of the noise but quickly wrote it off as an auditory hallucination courtesy of his epithet. After all, there wasn’t anything around that would make such a noise as far as he could see. Despite his mounting uneasiness about this place, he pushed forward and made his way to the end of the pool noodle maze, hurriedly climbing down the platform to the first floor of the structure hoping to leave as quickly as possible, only to his surprise, instead of more pool noodle like objects being suspended from the ceiling on the first floor of the structure, they were strewn about the floor. It seemed like they must have been hanging from the ceiling before but the chains had been cut, pretty jaggedly too, from what Sylvie could see as he bent down to examine them. Whatever did this, he definitely didn’t wanna meet up with it. He cautiously made his way out of the play structure and on to the floor, he briefly considered summoning some counting sheep to protect him if necessary but hesitated. If his counting sheep made too much noise whatever broke those chains would almost certainly take notice of them, and slightly more importantly to Sylvie in that moment, take notice of him.
Finally exiting the maze and feeling just a bit of his anxiety alleviate over the situation, he began scanning the grey brick walls of the building and much to his relief, quickly located the exit. However, not to his relief, in fact quite the opposite, something stood between Sylvie and the exit. A teenage girl not much older than himself, she pulled down a smiling purple bunny mask over her smirking face with one hand and clutched a chainsaw with a purple ribbon embellishment in the other. This situation was definitely concerning, but it wasn’t time to panic yet, Sylvie had plenty of ways to defend himself, after all he was a highly trained epithet user! This girl would be no match for him, if it even came down to a fight. Besides, he was almost sure that he could talk to her before she got around to using her chainsaw. Then she calmly took a step towards him. Sylvie quickly changed his mind and determined that she was not likely to be the reasoning type. Instead, he took a slightly fearful step back and shouted, preparing himself for his ultimate attack. “Dream big!” Unlike Sylvie’s usual expectation for this attack though, nothing happened. No falling asleep, no big Scottish bull alter ego popping out to save the day. Just a scared doctor who even to this moment would insist that he was not just a scared kid, despite rapidly mounting evidence to the contrary. This was officially the time to panic.