Chapter Twelve

Ms. Winters, in the dungeon tangentially located behind Pa Pa Jiang’s restaurant, New York City, Day 51

As Ms. Winters waited for its master to begin the experiment, it saw a crystal begin glowing brighter and brighter before suddenly disintegrating into a grey cloud which then rushed at him too fast for him to respond, and the instant it touched him he absorbed it into his body and was wracked by terrible pain like his flesh was burning and being torn apart at the same time. As time went on, and the pain got worse and worse, everything went black.

When Ms. Winters regained his senses, he didn’t find himself in the dungeon, but rather floating over a black plain. As he looked around confusedly, trying to understand what was going on, the darkness gradually lit up on one side by a gray light, which grew brighter and brighter, and veins of gray began to slowly travel across the dome of the sky, lighting up the plain with a dim light, and making Ms. Winters feel a deep sense of danger, though he didn’t know why.

Ms. Winters tried to run from the light, but rather than running he began to drift away from the light at an increasing pace, the gray veins stretching across the sky like a tree’s branches as if keeping pace with him, and before he knew it, most of the sky was covered in gray, and he was standing under the last patch of darkness in the sky, stretching down to the ground behind a large tiger. Instinctually, Ms. Winters felt a phantom sense of intimidation from the tiger, at least until he noticed that the tiger seemed more familiar and comforting than intimidating, but felt a sense of awe at the majestic beast nevertheless.

As Ms. Winters was distracted, the gray light encroached closer and closer, and the tiger began to cower away from it. Seeing this, Ms. Winters felt a sense of wrongness, why was this great tiger cowering from these gray lights, they weren’t that scary! With that thought, suddenly, Ms. Winters wasn’t watching the tiger, he was the tiger, and he gave out a roar of resistance toward the encroaching gray.

Almost as if in response, the gray veins stopped moving across the dome of the sky, and emerged instead as countless tendrils, descending and reaching out for him. Before they could reach him however, he bolted from his place, racing back from where he came while dodging the tendrils that were still aiming at him. As he dashed across the wide plain, more tendrils emerged from the sky and descended after him, forcing him to keep running as hard as he could, dodging to the left and right to avoid them as they crashed into the ground behind him. He continued for so long he lost track of the time, but never seemed to make any progress toward the gray light on the horizon and away from the tendrils.

After Ms. Winters had long become bored dodging, he could only contemplate attacking the tendrils back as a way to break the monotony that wasn’t even interrupted by exhaustion. On impulse, the next time a tendril came at him, he tried to take a bite out of it in the midst of dodging, but missed. It took several more tries, but eventually he succeeded, and when he did, the tendril quickly disintegrated, and he somehow felt stronger, and more energetic.

Excited by his success, Ms. Winters continued to attack the tendrils, and as he gradually took down the tendrils one by one, he gradually grew in size. Unfortunately, as he became larger and larger, he began to get hit more often by the tendrils, which would cause the part that was touched to itch and burn while paradoxically also becoming numb and slightly unresponsive and stained gray, but as he took out more tendrils, he recovered. As the resulting game of catch between him and the tendrils continued for what felt another eternity, neither side was entirely successful, but Ms. Winters proved significantly more successful overall.

Another thing he noticed, was that as he grew bigger, he also seemingly grew closer to the grey light on the horizon, while the grey covering the sky gradually depleted and plunged the world back into darkness, leaving only the gray light, and a massive Ms. Winters. When he finally reached the light, he saw the figure of the woman he had captured earlier, crying. Concerned, he went up to her, however, she suddenly erupted into an unavoidable tide of tendrils that raced toward his bulky form in an attempt to grab or hit him, much too fast for him to react. Before he knew it he was half pinned down and struggling to resist with half and soon his entire body afflicted by a mild burning sensation, chomping away at tendrils at the glacial pace his mostly numb body allowed him.

Though he was ultimately dies gray by the experience, he emerged the victor and there was once again just the two of them. The faint ghost of the woman he had captured, and the tired, sore, bedraggled behemoth he had becomes. The woman reached out as if to hug him, but he thought it better to just bite her head off and be done with it, causing her to disintegrate like tendrils had, leaving him alone in the dark space once again.

As time passed, Ms. Winters felt himself drifting back toward the center of the plain, and began to glow with a faint gray light, illuminating the recently darkened space once again. Soon after he began to glow, the grey light began to emerge from him as tendrils stretching out slowly across the plain. Despite the fact that the tendrils were now emerging from him, he proceeded to bite them out of habit. Rather than disintegrating the tendrils remained, so he proceeded to eat them and prevent them from reaching out, slowly growing full and bloated with them. Over time, the tendrils slowly came less and less, and the gray light dimmed alongside it. Swollen and bloated, Ms. Winters found itself exhausted for the first time since it had arrived, so he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

When he next opened his eyes, he was once again drifting about the space, but this time he was once again watching the tiger he had been in the center of the plain. As he watched the tiger gradually began to shrink in size as it became a gray crystal, and once it had reached only a few inches in diameter, with a sudden crack, the glowing grey crystal broke open and crystalline roots began to emerge from the seed and dig into the plain. A short while later, a sprout emerged from the remains of the tiger and grew up into the sky, rapidly becoming a great tree whose branches reached out across the dome of the sky, with crystal leaves and blossoms giving off shimmering pollen that gently settled upon the plain, now uneven with roots. Once he had had his fill of the sight, he closed his eyes to it for the final time in a long, long while, and opened his eyes to see the final room of the dungeon once more.

“Mrrr… Hrrr… Harrr… Hall… Harro… Hallo… Hello,” Ms. Winters managed to growl out to his master.