CELLS A2 AND A3
Tristan's head was spinning before he even opened his eyes. He was first aware of the vibration all around him -- a steady, soothing beat… similar to the approach of an oncoming supply train. It took him almost a full minute to realize that it was him that was doing the shaking.
Shivering. He was cold.
Confused, Tristan opened his eyes and regretted it immediately, shutting them back violently.
Back in the dark. He was failing to make sense at what he had just seen. His breath caught in his throat and his heart pumped faster. Carefully, fighting off the headache, he opened his eyes again.
Bright light. White bright light. Nothing in the forest was this bright and chilly.
He was genuinely cold and his head hurt like hell, so this wasn't a dream. He felt gravity pushing down on one side of his body, the other side as flat as a board. He was lying down. But… the ground was so… lacking in texture. It didn't feel like the floor of his treetop apartment. There were no lines, no splinters, no gaps between boards. It was almost-
Metallic.
Tristan froze, no longer blinking. Everything he saw was fuzzy and white, and he desperately wanted his eyes to come into focus. Robotropolis! It couldn't be anywhere else, but how was that possible? The last thing he remembered was… falling asleep. Safe. Sound. Home. Not in the city, no, not-
He strained, struggled to hear any unnatural sounds; machinery, industry, repetitive movement. He tried to smell oil and rust. He couldn't, but he also couldn't smell the forest, or the river, or anything that signified he was at home. He could, however, smell something faint, under the eerie antiseptic void all around him, the first familiar sensation since he had woken up.
His eyes were beginning to adjust to the haze. Most everything around him was white space, but in front of him was an out-of-focus, multicolored blob. With something to concentrate on, the rest of his senses came back to him. The more he blinked, the more the room came into focus.
Others. He could smell them. And now he could hear them breathing, steadily, sleepily. He couldn't tell how many there were, but he didn't want to rush finding out. He lifted his head off the ground and almost gasped out loud when he saw himself staring back.
The floor was one giant mirror. Tristan saw himself repeated to infinity, a disheveled and confused gray fox with a horrible headache on top of more and on top of more. The ceiling was a mirror too. The world started spinning.
Keeping his breath calm and even, he tried moving.
"C-come on…" It took some more waking up but it was more or less successful. He grunted quietly, his arms wobbling as he pushed himself off of the smooth surface. The movement was enough to stop his shivering. Tristan rolled over and sat up, looking around.
The others with him in this strange space were beginning to come around as well, twitching and blinking rapidly. Reactivation. He recognized some of the others nearby from Knothole, but didn't know them personally. He counted three bodies in close vicinity. Taking a deep breath, he crawled carefully over to the nearest one, a mound of black, gray, and orange fur that probably belonged to a bobcat.
Uneasily reaching out and touching the fur, he gently shook the shoulder of the waking body. "Hey… hey…"
The body woke with a sudden start and jerked around to face Tristan, backpedaling arm-and-leg two feet back. It turned out to be a bobcat after all. His bright yellow eyes moved all over the room, paranoid, frantic, confused. Several others behind Tristan shared the same reaction.
He shifted his attention from the bobcat to the room, while shakily standing to his feet. He saw millions upon millions of other gray foxes doing the exact same motion.
The walls… all of them, perfect mirrors. Near impossible to tell what was real and what wasn't. The pain in Tristan's head was murder, but this was a problem that needed addressing. He took a few moments to pick out one corner of the room, the corner he was facing. North. He continued moving his eyes over the walls in the straight line, to his right. He met his own mirror image in the east wall.
… Nothing unusual. His eyes were a little red, and his gray fur was spiked outwards in every direction known in the universe, but he looked okay. Nothing injured, nothing tampered with, all parts accounted for.
There was something to the immediate right of his reflection. Tristan started to approach, but stopped when he finally recognized what they were.
Bunk beds. One pair. Pushed right up against the wall.
The fox turned 180 degrees. He carefully stepped over and around the three still sitting down, ignoring the cries of surprise and trying to keep calm, coming up to another set of bunk beds. Two pairs this time. Four beds clumped together.
Keeping away at arm's length just in case, he bent down and peered through the space between the top and bottom bunks. Further away, he could see himself looking back. There was another bunk against that mirror too. And he found more people still sitting on the floor.
Tristan walked around the middle bunks to inspect something, toying with an idea. He looked at the floor where the four bunks met. He found it: a small, dark groove in the floor.
He kneeled down, scrutinizing the thick line. It was only about an inch deep, and didn't appear to serve any obvious purpose. It ran along the floor in between the two bunk beds. He followed the line to the nearest mirrored wall, where it continued all the way up and crossed the length of the white ceiling.
He felt inside the groove but couldn't detect any break in the mirror.
He turned away, counting the others in the room with him. "Hmmm." Four on one side of the groove, four on the other, cut in half by a long trench. Tristan looked at the groove on the ceiling again, following it down, to the opposite side, the south wall, where-
Doors!
Tristan sprinted passed the confused onlookers, running along the groove, around the bunks, keeping the doors in sight. He approached as swiftly has he could, panting. He slowed down and stopped at the entry of one of these chambers. His excitement faded.
No door. Only a door frame.
Peering inside, he didn't know what to expect but considered it to be a trap. The tiny room was barely big enough for more than three people inside at once. These walls weren't mirrored. To his immediate left was a toilet. To his right was a shower head jutting out from above him. Below that, about waist-high, were two round knobs, two letters on each: H and C. Against the far wall, up high, near the ceiling, was a barred window.
"Oh… no…"
Tristan turned from the room to find the others looking at him, some on their feet, some still prone on the ground, all waiting for an answer from him.
"Bathrooms."
This was no dream. He would have woken up by now. The bars on the window suggested the worst…
Capture.
Tristan hurried back over to the bobcat he tried to wake up, jogging passed the others who were finally on their feet. Circling around to his front, he extended his paw, introducing himself.
"Tristan. I don't believe we've met."
The bobcat accepted the hand and pulled himself up, still wary. "We haven't. Buster." They shook.
In truth he was thinking of other things, his mind a whirlpool he couldn't keep under control, so many thoughts colliding with each other. He had been trying to smother his fear when he saw that Buster wasn't even looking at him anymore, but at something behind him, above him. Tristan turned and followed his gaze up to what he had missed: a sign, high on the east mirror wall.
A3.
A loud CLICK shocked everyone out of their daze. The east and west walls suddenly disappeared, offering a transparent glimpse into other rooms. There were more. Startled and frightened and scared just like Tristan and his group.
These weren't reflections.
They noticed the disappearance of the mirrored walls too…
And they ran, slamming against the glass partition. They clawed and scratched and pounded and cried out, trying to break through the barriers between them. No matter how hard they tried, the glass didn't budge or dent or crack. Tristan, not knowing what else to do, found himself with the rest of them, pounding and scratching, the glass walls that separated them holding fast. And still they tried.
No one wanted to try out the showers. In fact, everyone stayed out of the bathrooms as long as they could, fending off their curiosity and instead focusing on the bunk beds.
The frames were made of a soft metal alloy, something that could be easily dented by wrought iron or steel. The surface was smooth enough to glide on, and the tops of the poles were rounded off. Tristan got down on his stomach and tried to feel the point where the metal went into the glass, pressing as hard as he could with his fingers, but he couldn't. The transition was perfect, unreal. Impossible.
He took a chance and jumped up to the top bunk. He bounced up and down, hearing springs squeak. He pulled up the white sheet and looked under it. He tucked it back in. He picked up the white pillow and fluffed it, swung it against the glass. He set his pillow down and relaxed, laying on his back and seeing himself in the ceiling.
"I guess this is my bed…"
He watched the others in his cell assign themselves their own bunks, testing each one out for traps and watching the video cameras look back at them. Even Tristan couldn't help but steal an occasional look at them, fearing whoever was on the other side.
He was anything but tired. He was angry, and confused, and it took all of his concentration not to go nuts. The window in the bathroom was too high, the bars probably wouldn't budge, the glass wouldn't dent… No way out.
And they were being watched all the time by those goddamn video cameras.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about all of this was that no one else had spoken aloud yet, no one had addressed their situation. Tristan stared at his mirror image, watching his teeth grind back and forth. He wanted to shatter the silence like shattering every mirror in this prison.
"We're captured," he thought, rolling over on his side, watching the rest of his cell. "Are all of us? Maybe. I remember Knothole last. Falling asleep in my bedroom. In the trees. A slow end to a slow day. Nothing special. Long period of black, and when I wake up, I'm here. Did they all experience the same thing? Well, we'll find out when they start talking. And what about the rest? In other cells. More. Say Robotnik did this. Where are our leaders? Would he have something special planned for Sally? Sonic? Definitely for Sonic. But Robotnik was killed after Doomsday, wasn't he? He's back somehow? Maybe he never died. Snively isn't smart enough for all this. There's no vendetta. Okay, maybe he'd do it. This however, stinks of Robotnik."
Most importantly, what was planned for all of them? Where could all of this lead?
It couldn't end good, that was for sure.
The bathrooms looked like coffins. That was the problem. It was a constant reminder that death could be that close to all of them. And they had to look at themselves constantly, see how pathetic and small they truly were. The breeze from the bathroom brought the smell of sulfur. Robotropolis.
"We're really here…"
Tristan rolled over and buried his face into his pillow, pulling his blanket around him. He bit his bottom lip and forced the tears out of his eyes. Eventually, he fell asleep.