Chapter Text
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Anna’s alarm blared at her. It’s annoying. She begrudgingly opens her eyes. After her vision cleared, she rolled her head towards her nightstand. Her phone was buzzing with her morning alarm.
“Ugh,” She groaned, slapping her phone in an attempt to cease the alarm's ignorant beeping. She failed.
She decided to give in, sitting up in her bed. She glared at her phone and successfully clicked the “stop” button.
Anna looked down at her dark blue bedsheets that were now strewn all over the place in her conquest against the alarm.
“Why do I set my alarm so early?” she whined.
Anna stepped out of bed and walked out of her room. Her house was as empty as always. She never really took to filling it since she left.
In the kitchen, she cracked three eggs over a pan. The soothing sizzle rose up from the cooking eggs. Her apartment’s kitchen wasn’t exactly the largest. There were a couple cabinets, a fridge, an oven/stovetop, a dishwasher, and an airfryer.
Hung up on the wall was a calendar. The date of August 9th was circled. She’s supposed to visit her parents tomorrow. Living all the way in Cambridge, Massachusetts was a long way from home.
The United States sure was not what she expected. But hey, she’s not complaining. Anna’s made a few friends here, not as many as back home in London though.
Oh! The eggs!
Anna quickly turned the stove off, attempting to salvage her quickly burning eggs. She slipped them onto a plate. Now was not the time to reflect life choices, she has work to do.
Anna has begun working for a company here in the US. She was an accountant for this American branch of the company. Currently, she has some online papers to finish.
Anna walked over to her desk, plate of unseasoned eggs in hand. She slipped on her glasses and typed her password into her computer.
Sumloverofanime939
It’s a password she’s had since she was a kid. Thankfully, (hopefully) no one will ever know it. Anna pulled up all her usual programs and websites. She can’t let her financial degree go to waste after all.
She picked up her headphones. Anna can’t really work without music blaring in her ears. Her parents always warned her about it when she was a kid. They’d say things like, “You’re going to be deaf by 20!”. Jokes on them, she’s 29 and has only slight hearing damage.
A few hours, and YouTube playlists, down, and she was nearly done with work for the day. All she had left was a few pages of boring paperwork she’ll have to fill out. Thankfully for her, the fax machine issued to her by the company will prove better than the cloud or whatever the memo said.
She filled out the documents. Boring financial stuff that she dedicated most of her adult life to being able to legally fill out.
She pulled out her phone. The only notification was a message from her bank informing her that her account was low in balance.
Rolling her eyes, she opened her phone and scanned the paperwork. Annoyingly enough, she has to now upload the image to her computer and only then can she fax it.
After a few uploads and addressing later, she finally hit send. Her computer glitched out for a second. The screen displayed various different bars of colors. Anna groaned in annoyance.
“Great,” she muttered, “This isn’t going to be cheap.”
Anna pushed her chair back and leaned under her desk where her computer sat. Hopefully it’s something cheap, but when it comes to computers, everything’s expensive.
Her computer let out an alarmingly loud beeping sound, making Anna bang her head on her desk. It was a couple of short beeps, each with a different pitch.
Beep Beep Beep BEEP!
She looked back at her monitor. It was… completely normal. Maybe it was just something with the monitor? Whatever it was, she didn’t care. As long as it doesn’t cost her a kidney or two, she’s ok with it.
Her stomach growled. Ugh, what time was it? Judging by the sun outside, it was probably noon-ish. She’ll eat lunch after she makes sure the document has been sent.
Anna sat back down in her chair, still rubbing her head. Bumping it really hurt. Sure enough, the document was sent.
Anna let out a sigh of relief. That’s the first win this week!
…
It was Saturday.
Before Anna got up, she noticed something strange on her desktop. It was a file labeled “QuasiData_Explorer.exe” with the icon of an infinity symbol where the right half was dissipating into cuboid shapes.
Strange, she doesn’t remember downloading anything like that. It’s probably a virus from the… movie websites she’s been visiting. Streaming is so expensive that she has to dust off her pirate hat once in a while.
Eh, what does she have to lose anyways? She double clicked on the file. A single prompt appeared.
Run QuasiData_Explorer.exe?
[Yes] [No]
The second, the very second she clicked “yes”, the world exploded. Her computer screen glitched out, only displaying that same infinity symbol from before.
The ground violently shook, knocking her off her chair and onto the ground. She grabbed onto her desk and tried to pull herself up, only for the ground beneath her to crack away.
Only Anna fell. And fall she did. Anna fell into an infinite void of desaturated green and white. Cuboid structures colored in a greyish-red float probably 20 or so yards away.
She reached up, up towards the crack that led back to her own reality. Her screams seemingly drowned out by the vastness of this plane, never to be heard by anyone. It grew smaller and smaller, until it was as if it was nonexistent. Her hand glitched.
She let out a new scream of terror. Her hand glitched again. Then one of her legs. She could feel it morph and twist, even disconnect. It was painless, but still horrifying.
The further and further she fell, the more and more her body glitched and distorted. She could feel her body change. Her insides shifting and morphing. Her screams turned into a more gurgled sound, as if she had water in her lungs.
She could breathe perfectly fine. She could move her fingers. Her fingers! They were different! More pointed. No fingernails.
“What the hell?!” She screamed. It sounded… wrong.
“What the-?” Still wrong.
Anna made the mistake of looking down. A giant gaping crack, similar to the one that she fell through, was only a couple hundred feet below her. She could see what looked like ground.
“Holy shi-” There we are. Her voice still sounded gurgly but the words sounded right.
The crack got closer. She fell farther. Until finally, she passed through it. One finally glitchy mess, and she was now falling through the sky. She was heading straight for a platform. What looked like some pink paint was sprayed all over the place along with some paint of a mix of colors.
She saw two figures. One was standing in the ink, the other was just off of it. The world looked normal, just a few things off here and there. Maybe she was in another country?
None of that matters. Anna, once again, realized she was plummeting towards the ground at very fast speeds.
Terror took hold. She felt her body… shift. Not in the same glitchy way as before. She couldn’t feel her arms. Or her legs. Or anything else one would expect to feel. Only what seemed to be two large appendages which she could only describe as wavy sausages.
Six smaller ones, two one one side of the first two and four on the other, could be felt. Her mind snapped back to the fact that she was falling to her inevitable doom.
She let out what she could only think to be a gurgled final scream as she smacked into the pink paint on the floor.
She expected darkness. Or light? She wasn’t quite sure what to expect after death, but it sure wasn’t a pinkish plane with a slightly blurred view of what she just smacked into. It was like looking up while in water, except pink and a little more clear.
Come to think of it, she could still feel her floppy, sausage-like, appendages. Only now did she notice it felt like she was holding something. It was like she was gripping something with her whole body all at once.
She relaxed this “grip”. Her form started to morph again, she freaked out. Back at square one, she saw and heard the figure start rushing up to her. Once again, she tried relaxing the “grip” again. She let herself morph.
Thank God.
She was back to normal, or as normal as she is now. Her fingers were still looking like flesh pencils, but she had two arms and two legs.
The figure approached her. She looked up from her flesh-pencil fingers. She let out another gurgled shriek. Standing in front of her looked like a human, but very different.
The most blaring difference from a regular human was the… hair? It was as if this person’s hair was made out of octopus tentacles. Pink tentacles at that.
“Are you alright?” The creature asked, its voice sounding feminine.
It sounded… wrong. Anna understood the words being said, but that most certainly wasn’t English. Or any language for that matter.
“Wh-where the heck am I?” Anna nearly yelled, still in shock.
That came out definitely in English. The octopus-person thing looked confused. Can octopi-people be confused? Well, if they can speak some sort of gurgly language what can’t they do?
“What?” It said again.
Ok, think Anna. Good, her thoughts were still in English. I sounded like that before. This should be like being bilingual, right? Wait… how does that work?
Anna stood a little straighter, trying to seem less frightened. If this thing was hostile, she needed to show that she wasn’t afraid.
“Where… am I?” There we go. That sounded like gibberish, but apparently it wasn’t because the creature answered.
“You’re just outside of Inkopolis,” The creature said.
Inkopolis? Where the heck is that?!
“What is Inkopolis?” She asked, a little less awkwardly this time. It’s become apparent that she’s somehow fluent in this strange language.
“It’s a city. Did you just come from the Ocotodomes?”
What the actual hell is an Octodome?
Before Anna could say anything, the other thing from before yelled over.
“Hey, Agent 8! What’s going on over there? Are they hurt?” It sounded like an old man.
“I don’t think so,” The creature, which Anna is guessing is named Agent 8, called back.
Anna looked around her, fully taking in the area. There was a city not too far away that resembled Japanese cities she’s seen pictures of online.
Agent 8 turned around to look at her again. She smiled softly.
“Come on, let’s head to town. Maybe we can figure out what’s going on there.”
Anna hesitated. She couldn’t tell if the creature was actually being nice, or was trying to lure her into a trap to inevitably eat her.
Deciding this was her only choice, she said, “Uh… Ok…”.
Not very assuring, but it was all she could say. Agent 8 held out its hand.
“I’m Agent 8, but you can just call me 8. Do you remember your name?”
Of course she remembers her name, what kind of question is that?
“It’s Anna,” She responded, hesitantly shaking 8’s hand.
Anna noticed that its fingers were the same as hers. Her eyes opened wide. She slowly raised her hands up to her hair, and was met with two tentacles.