Chapter Text
The Okami Lab felt louder than usual today. Vents rattled and pipes hissed. Kellory moved through it with the wary posture of someone who’d long accepted this place might decide to eat him one day. He was tired of this.
Kellory had been personally victimized by the concept of engineering during his time here. One pant leg was damp for reasons he refused to investigate, and the reality-bending gun had started making a noise that could generously be described as “Not Quite Right”.
His boots clicked on the metal mesh walkway. The rift gun hung at his hip. His hand resting on it protectively as another door slid open. Another puzzle chamber. This one was insultingly empty.
A long room stretched out before him, pipes crossing overhead, gears the size of dinner tables turning in the walls. No instructions. No platforms. No glowing markers to tell him what fresh hell he was expected to solve. Just a low hiss from somewhere up in the rafters and... A box.
“Great,” Kellory muttered. “This should be easy.”
He stepped inside anyway, there wasn’t much left to do. The door sealed shut behind him. This place loved its drama.
Kellory tried to find something interesting about the room. Something to break, or fidget with, or bang his head against until his skull cracked open. But all he could really find was...
Just a box. Square, metal, unassuming. About knee-height. Just like all the other boxes he’d seen so far. Which was, obviously, the biggest red flag yet. Kellory stopped halfway across the floor and stared down at the object.
“…Hi?”
The box, being a box, did not respond.
Kellory’s ear flicked. “Don’t get cute with me,” he warned the air. “I just did three puzzle rooms in a row that all tried to drown me, compress me, or emotionally manipulate me. If this thing explodes, I will leave.”
He stepped closer, despite every survival instinct he possessed whispering no in increasingly creative ways. Up close, the box looked even more ordinary. It wasn’t special.
Except… it felt special. The way the chamber lights softened around it. The faint warmth radiating from the metal. Kellory got the illogical notion that the box had been waiting.
For him.
He exhaled sharply through his nose. “Oh no,” he muttered. “Absolutely not.” But he crouched anyway, reaching one cautious paw toward the box. For the first time since he woke up trapped in this mechanical nightmare, the room didn’t feel hostile. It felt attentive, like maybe it liked him. Like whatever happened next mattered.
Kellory’s paw hovered an inch above the metal, waiting for the jump scare, the explosion, the something. But nothing happened.
Nothing… except a faint tickle at the edge of his thoughts.
Like someone tapping on the window of his brain.
He froze. Ears perked. Tail completely still.
Oh, that was bad. That was new. That was spectacularly bad.
The tapping became a whisper. Not in the room, but inside. A soft, fuzzy little voice curling into his consciousness.
F i z z l e a m i l k b u d d y.
Kellory blinked. “What.”
The voice repeated, more insistent, like a tiny creature shoving syllables into his head with both paws.
F I Z Z L E A M I L K B U D D Y.
He sat back on his heels, staring hard at the box, as if it might suddenly sprout a face and explain itself.
“Buddy,” Kellory said slowly, “I am not hallucinating a box telling me to... did you say milkbuddy?”
The box remained a box.
But the voice didn’t.
Fizz-le. A. Milk-bud-dy.
Kellory ran a paw down his face. Milkbuddies. Those creepy little Easter egg plush things that played the same three notes of elevator music on loop and vanished in a puff of sparkles if you carried them through a fizzle field. He’d found two so far. He thought they were cute! A tiny mercy in a place that otherwise treated him like lab-grade chew-toys.
So the idea of… sacrificing one? To impress a box? Absolutely not. Boxes had been nothing but annoying and evil the whole time hes been here.
Kellory planted his paws on the floor. “We’re not doing that. I refuse. Pick literally anything else. A lever. A switch. A live electrical wire. I’ll lick one. But I’m not fizz—”
A soft pop! sounded somewhere behind him.
Kellory spun.
There, sitting politely in a newly opened alcove, was a Milkbuddy.
Pastel-blue. Round little ears and cute little eyes. The moment it saw him, it played the first three notes of its elevator-jingle: doot-dee-doo.
Kellory’s ears drooped. He picked the tiny Milkbuddy up and held it in mid air in front of him.
Behind him, the box radiated unmistakable impatience.
F i z z l e i t.
Kellory hugged the Milkbuddy protectively to his chest. “Absolutely not. This one is staying. Don’t look at me like that." Kellory touched the plushy's nose and made a delightful "boop" sound.
The box’s presence sharpened. Affection shifting to something like jealousy that was sharp in Kellory's mind.
F i z z l e t h a t t h i n g.
The box did the psychic equivalent of narrowing its eyes.
Kellory glared right back at it. “No! If you want me to fizzle something so badly, fizzle yourself.”
Offended silence. Then a sharp flick of disapproval.
C a n n o t. B o x e s c a n ' t m o v e.
“Well that sounds like a you problem,” Kellory shot back.
The Milkbuddy chimed again, its little speaker giving a soft dee-doo-doo-dee as if trying to mediate the tension.
Kellory looked down at it, ears softening. “See? He gets it. He’s sweet. He doesn’t want to poof.”
L I E S.
The box snapped in his skull. A full-volume thought-bark.
Kellory staggered. “Ow! Hey! Indoor voice!” Kellory covered the Milkbuddy's ears protectively. That did it. Kellory rounded on the box like a furious parent. “Don’t yell at him! He’s sensitive!”
F i z z l e i t,
the box insisted, tone sliding into something smug.
T h e n y o u a n d I c a n p r o g r e s s.
Kellory’s jaw dropped. “Progress? Progress to what, exactly? This is murder."
The box pulsed with the emotional equivalent of a shrug.
He held the Milkbuddy tighter.
And the box watched. And waited.