Chapter Text
I woke up, and I could tell right away that something was wrong.
This wasn’t my bed, for one thing. My bed had blue sheets and green pillows, a mashup of a space and dinosaur bedsets I hadn’t been able to decide between. This bed was pure white, and I would have thought I was in Mom’s bed except hers had a flower print and this one was boring.
It sounded weird here, too. There was a lot of beeping, and it almost reminded me of something…
Oh, a hospital! I had been in a hospital before. Last year I had fallen off the play structure at recess (well, I told people I fell, really I was just trying to jump onto a nearby tree to get a closer look at a bird’s nest. And then I fell.), and had to get my ankle checked out at the hospital (hadn’t been broken, but I had to walk carefully for weeks and Mom grounded me from going more than a foot off the ground). It had sounded a bit like this.
I looked around the room. I guess it sort of looked like a hospital. There were a lot more buttons and flashing lights than I remembered.
Maybe this was the hospital on the other side of town?
I realized suddenly that I was alone. “Hello?” I called out. “Mom? Doctors? Anyone?”
“What is two plus two?” I jumped about a foot off the bed as a lady’s voice came out of nowhere.
“Uh, what?” I asked, looking around to try and see someone. No luck.
The lady spoke again. “What is two plus two?” She sounded weird. I had watched my older cousin play video games before, and this voice sounded a bit like those characters.
I answered her anyway. “Four.” That was easy. I could do much harder math than that. We had just talked about adding two digit numbers together in school. “Where’s my mom?”
“What is your name?”
I could feel myself starting to get annoyed at the lady. Well, really I was starting to get scared, but I’d rather be annoyed, so I clung to that. “Who are you, where am I?”
There was no change in the lady’s voice. “What is your name?”
I caved. “Ryland. Ryland Grace.”
This time, there was no follow-up question. The silence, apart from the ongoing beeping, was almost worse. I tried to stay annoyed, but fear was starting to take over the longer and longer I went without seeing someone.
“Hello? Voice lady? Is anyone there?” My voice got quieter. “Mom? Where are you?”
I looked around again, trying to gain any clue as to what was going on. Just a lot of machines I couldn’t make any sense of. There wasn’t even a window or a clock, so I had no idea what time it was. The room I was in wasn’t that big, and there was an open doorway on the other side. I decided that I wasn’t going to get any answers just laying here, and I got out of the bed.
It was higher up than my one at home and I stumbled a bit as I hit the floor. Now that I was out of the covers, for the first time I noticed what I was wearing: a big t-shirt, one that went to my knees, one sock, and nothing else. The shirt had the word “Ah!” written on it in a large box, and something else beneath it I couldn’t quite read. The something of something.
I looked up quickly as I suddenly heard footsteps coming towards me. It sounded off somehow, though I couldn’t quite place why.
That was, until something came through the doorway, and I thought two things simultaneously.
The first was, Oh, it sounds weird because it has five legs.
The second was the one I voiced. “Ahhh! Giant spider! Help, help!”