There was a low grumbling, deep and dull, echoing through her skull like the ringing of a weather siren as it slowly and steadily forced her back to consciousness.

  Alice weakly rubbed at her temple with one of her hands, her skull throbbing painfully as she finally awoke, the remainder of her body not feeling much better as she quickly discovered that every single inch of her ached like hell.

  “…fuck’s sake, I really gotta stop waking up like this…”

  “Hm…? Ah, it would seem you’ve finally returned to us.”

  A voice chimed in alongside her mumbling, the sound both almost impossible to hear and deafeningly loud all at once, Alice recoiling from the noise instinctively.

  “Yeah yeah… morning, L--”

  Her teeth cmped down on her tongue seemingly of their own volition before she could finish her half-asleep greeting, earning a pained groan as her sharpened fangs sliced through the end of the fleshy pink muscle.

  She banged a fist into the surface she was resting against hard, her other hand attempting to wrench her jaw open again by force as it fought to stay closed.

  “For goodness’s sake, calm yourself for once. I am trying to assist you while you’re still recovering, so stop fighting me back…!”

  A familiar voice rung between her ears, her fog-filled brain taking a moment to realize it was Sclera speaking directly into her thoughts yet again.

  “Nnngh… making a girl bite her tongue off is helping her now?”

  “It is when they’re still barely conscious and attempting to divulge the name of someone who swore us to secrecy, yes.”

  “The hell are you on about now? I’m just saying… good morning…”

  As the duo bickered back and forth within their shared thoughts, Alice’s awareness of her surroundings slowly sharpened itself, finally realizing she had no idea at all where she was right now.

  The familiar blood-drenched kiddie pool that usually served as her coffin to awaken from was wholly absent, her current resting spot instead an unremarkable single bed, the sheets below her lightly stained by red and pink splotches intermittently dotting their surface.

  Around her were three almost perfectly identical white walls, joined around an equally pristine ceiling and cold tiled floor below, the only furnishings inside the small room the bed she was already lying on.

  And at the farthest end of the space from her was the final wall of the tiny space, eschewing the sanitized pure white for a clear gss partition covering the entirety of the space, allowing her a full view outwards while still keeping her neatly enclosed and cordoned off from what was outside.

  On the other side of that viewing pane, rather than the rough and worn-down features of Lonnie Ga she was used to waking up to, stood a face she was significantly less enthused to see, Willow Bora’s polished and pristine expression staring back at her, arms crossed behind his back as he watched her fil about in her barely-awake state.

  “Good morning to you as well, Ms. Decaras. Though, I do believe ‘good evening’ would be the more accurate statement given the current time. Not that I believe you would be aware of the time given your current circumstances, but a mild correction to be offered nonetheless.”

  She stared back at him through her half-lidded eye, attempting to process what led her to being caged up in front of one of her least pleasant new acquaintances.

  “I judge by your expression that you’re still a bit… confused on the current situation. Understandable really, you did not seem particurly aware of things when we first found you, so I doubt you recall most of it.”

  “I’d remember checking into a room this fucking ugly, yeah. So I’m assuming you lot all threw me in here or something while I was out or something. That about right?”

  “Nail on the head, Ms. Decaras. Though the Library’s cells were in part designed by myself, so your distaste for the sweet simplicity of their decor wounds me, if only ever so slightly.”

  A single of her eyebrows raised quizzically.

  “Cell…? What, already that sick of me? I know you lot ain’t the biggest fans, but that’s a bit much, ain’t it?”

  Willow chuckled politely, his pristine expression not shifting in the slightest.

  “The individual opinions of the Library’s members are irrelevant and were not taken into consideration before or after pcing you within this facility. Rather, you were pced here for both your own safety as well as the safety of our own members and the popuce at rge… until we could be certain of everyone’s safety ourselves, of course.”

  “Safety? I’m not someone’s rabid dog, the hell are you on about?”

  His head tilted just barely to one side, his eyes narrowing as he attempted to study the annoyed look pstered across her face.

  “…hm. You do seem to be genuinely aware of why you’re here… very curious. In that case, I believe it best to attempt to jog your memories some. What is the st thing you remember, then…?”

  Still gring back at him, she eventually closed her eye again, trying to stir her memory up again, her brain still a mess of static and white noise internally.

  “I was… hm. I left here after talking to Gwyn, yeah? Walked… walked all the way home, I remember that part. Then, uh… shit, after that I… hmm…”

  She conveniently left Lonnie’s name out of her recollections as she tried to reassemble a list of events, but rapidly found the noise in her thoughts grew significantly worse the further past that point she tried to recall.

  “After that I… right, went downtown, and… shit, Gwyn. Is Gwyn ok? Tell me Gwyn is ok, did you drag her back here too?!”

  A fuzzy memory of blood trickling over Gwyn’s battered form emerged from the churning seas of her memory, a single image that was crystal clear amidst the cloudy waters all around it.

  Even just recalling seeing her like that stirred some instinct inside her again, trying to leap off of the stiff bed and onto her feet, only to find her legs still uncooperative as she immediately tumbled to the floor below, bones moving in all the wrong ways as she struggled to move.

  “…Ms. Lapin is recovering in our medical wing nearby, yes. She was severely wounded when we found her, but… from what we gathered, she remained mostly alright due in part to your own swift actions. Actions which the council has taken note of, and seen as sufficient basis for allowing you greater autonomy than otherwise would have been tolerated after what occurred.”

  “The hell are you talking about? What actions? And what the fuck do you mean about ‘allowing’ me, I don’t need permission to--”

  There was a click as Willow pressed a button outside her enclosure, a screen set smoothly against the wall outside coming to life as a series of still images flickered to life in front of her.

  Her arms still mostly functional, Alice weakly pushed herself somewhat upright, eye fixed on the screen as she tried to stare at what was being shown there.

  A massive monolith of flesh, shaped vaguely into the loose form of a wolf, its every featured stretched and pulled out over its hulking frame as steaming viscera sloughed off of it in certain angles of the photos.

  It was a monster, pin and simple. One of those unnatural beasts that showed up in international news from time to time, the only clear difference being the sheer crity and quantity of the pictures themselves.

  “…the fuck is that thing supposed to be? Grace City doesn’t have monsters.”

  “Correct, Grace City has been spared the appearance of beasts like this that have necessitated magical girl protections in other cities since a short while after the Library began their operations here. However, as of several days ago, this one arrived well within the city’s perimeter without so much as a single warning, prompting a good deal of unrest among civilians unfortunate enough to witness its appearance.”

  Willow began to slowly pace back and forth in front of her cell, Alice’s eyes still fixed on the creature being shown to her.

  “Of course, even without magical beasts running amok in our city, the Library does stand ready to address their appearance if they do happen to show up within our jurisdiction. We would hardly qualify as peacekeepers if we couldn’t manage that much at least, no?”

  “Yeah yeah, I get it, you’re all very good at your jobs. The fuck has this got to do with me though?”

  “Well, this particur beast proved almost painfully easily to detain and deliver back to the Library for further study. You see, when we found it, it had already entered some kind of… protective hibernation state. Curled safely around our Ms. Lapin, no less. It seemed to have taken a liking to her, even despite the carnage it had wreaked upon the remainder of the area.”

  He clicked another of the buttons, one of the images on dispy zooming in to show the hulking creature wrapped tightly around something, the shades of pink and white sticking up from the center of its bloody mass betraying the identity of the person shielded within.

  “It was… eh?”

  Alice simply stared at the image dumbfounded, exhausted neurons struggling to reconnect to one another as she tried to process the expnation.

  “As the beast provided no real resistance to our efforts to move it, we simply took it upon ourselves to relocate it here, out of the public eye. It didn’t seem keen on the thought of releasing Ms. Lapin either, and in her state we considered it best to not attempt to forcefully extract her. For fear of disturbing that… thing again.”

  “I… guess that makes sense…? Why the fuck did it care about her so much?”

  “Isn’t that a bit of a silly question? You should know that better than anyone else here, Ms. Decaras.”

  “Why would I know?! I’ve been stuck in here for… fuck, how long was I out…? It’s usually just a couple hours, so…”

  Alice once more struggled to push herself upright, her entire body feeling like it was made of lead, her limbs sluggish and heavy as they struggled to respond to her attempts at movement.

  Willow took his eyes off of her sprawled out form on the cell floor below him, pulling his sleeve back a scant few inches to check his watch.

  “Let’s see… currently, you’ve been here for four days, two hours, and twenty seven minutes, just about. Quite the heavy sleeper.”

  She paused, blinking rapidly as her already struggling brain cells were overexerted yet again.

  “Four… days?!”

  The girl attempted to scramble up to her feet again, more energy behind her motions this time, grabbing onto the nondescript bed frame in an attempt to steady herself as she rose off of the cold tile floor.

  As she managed to get her feet below her however, every bone in her legs protested loudly, legs shaking as she struggled to bend her knees, her limbs refusing to bend properly even as she pushed herself.

  Eventually, the overexertion was too much for her, the worn down girl flopping forwards, facefirst onto the bed in front of her… her knees happily bending with her this time as she fell in the wrong direction.

  The sudden realization finally drew her attention to her uncooperative appendages, still ft against the side of the bed as she forced her head to look backwards.

  In hindsight, it seemed incredibly easy to understand why her legs seemed to disagree with her attempts at moving them in the same familiar ways she always had.

  After all, neither of them were facing the right way.

  Her toes wiggled through her sneakers, the woman finally noticing her much of her body felt wrong since she woke up. Asymmetrical limbs all twisted around backwards, organs churning in parts of her that should have been solid mass, bones struggling to fill space that should have been reserved for muscle, her every internal function scrambled and out of pce as her body roiled and throbbed and growled.

  “We were hoping the… unpleasant alterations would have healed themselves up somewhat while we allowed you to recover, but it seems your bodily memory has been thoroughly corrupted by whatever it is you did before.”

  “Can you stop with the fucking… nnngh… with the cryptic shit, and tell me what the fuck you stuck me here for?”

  She weakly gripped the edge of the bed frame for support as she tried to drag herself up, a thumb pushing out from either side of the strained skin of her outstretched hand as she struggled to close the misshapen mass of digits and far too many knuckles around the aluminum structure.

  “I don’t know why the hell I’m here, and I don’t know what the hell that thing on the screen is either, so can you just--”

  “Hmm, either you’re quite the compulsive liar, or you really don’t recall anything… very curious…”

  “Oy, I just said to cut the mystery shit already…!”

  Alice snarled in the direction of the gss, fshing rows of painstakingly sharpened fangs at Willow from within her bruised and battered jaw, the raise in her voice earning an almost imperceptible flinch from the otherwise perfectly calm man.

  He sighed deeply, shifting back and forth impatiently as he tried to parse any kind of masked intent behind her raised voice, considering whether or not to simply inform her about the events from days earlier.

  “…fine, fine. The rest of the council is currently primarily on your side to begin with, so I suppose I may as well concede to their judgment on the matter…”

  Willow stared down at her twisted and broken form, cold eyes gring down the bridge of her nose at her, his earlier formal distaste for her now stirring much closer under the surface of his features.

  “That thing is you, Ms. Decaras. And the Library is keeping you here until we’re given an acceptable reason for why exactly you became that horrid, monstrous thing.”