The Multiverse War, Part One

Chapter Four

Erin whirled around and shined her light at the other side of the warehouse, where an identical door stood. She ran over and yanked open the door, revealing another dark warehouse. With an identical blue metal door, with another prisoner in a grubby tank top shining a flashlight into the doorway they stood in. Erin's heartbeat stopped, then sped up considerably. She pointed the gun behind her while staring ahead, and sure enough, the figure in front of her shone their flashlight at her in the same position.

Well. Shit.

Whatever these doors and this warehouse was, she was trapped. Walking through this door would transport her to the other door, and vice versa. Erin decided to explore the warehouse for possible weaknesses in the structure. She directed her flashlight along the walls, searching for cracks or a closed window. As she searched for faults, a glob of something wet slapped her shoulder. Erin inserted her index into the mass of fluid and found it to be warm and thick, like jelly. She sniffed her fingers and recoiled. It smelled like horribly bad breath with a touch of decomposition.

Shining her flashlight up she found, dangling from the rafters, a massive collection of human-sized egg sacs. They were a pale purpleish, covered in indigo veins and pulsed like macabre hearts, some occasionally dripping the mucus-like substance that they were coated in. Erin's heart began to race, as she saw the egg sac directly above her begin to pulse and writhe faster. It swelled and burst, sending a rain of slime onto the floor and spraying across the walls and, of course, slapping into Erin's face and torso.

Erin tried pushing it off her shoulders and clearing her face, the latter of which she  succeeded in completing. However, all she accomplished with the former was covering her hands in slime. It suddenly occurred to her that, following the egg sac bursting, she heard a wet thud a few feet ahead of her. Hands shaking, she pointed her flashlight at the source of the thud, and found what appeared to be a mass of intertwined tentacles that somewhat resembled a humanoid creature. It was unconscious, or at least appeared to be, so Erin flipped it onto its back - if you could call it that - and further examined it. One of its arms was just a long tentacle, generally proportional. The other arm was huge, and appeared to be three muscular tentacles fused together to form an arm with three weird fingers. Its face was round, with two tiny tentacles draping down with a third one in the middle, like a beard that covered its face. Two beady red eyes poked out from the gaps formed by the middle tentacle and the other two. Its legs were lean and muscular, but also appeared to be the only thing not made of tentacles. It even had a couple of weird stone-like toes on each stubby foot. For some reason, she didn't think this thing was very fast.

Maybe she could use the obvious strength of its right arm to get out of the damn place. She knelt and poked the smaller tentacle, and in the span of a couple seconds, found herself inches from an egg sac and then plummeting toward the concrete fifty feet below. Colliding with the floor would have been significantly more painful if she hadn't landed on her side, which was coated in slime. Her arm was crushed instantly, but she slid into a nearby wall which, while it hurt, still stopped her movement and allowed her to assess what had happened.

There was great pain in her lower chest, and she thought she had broken at least three ribs. The creature on the other side of the warehouse had awoken when she tapped it, and launched her across the room with its massive right arm. It was currently trying to stand, but struggling somewhat. After all, it had just been born. Erin wondered how much stronger this thing was once it was fully grown. Already it was almost as tall as Kaldrun, albeit much wider, mostly due to its huge muscle-tentacle-things.

Erin tried to stand. It was almost like a race with the creature to get up first. She put her uninjured right arm, which was also holding the gun, underneath her for support. She then tried to stand, but this send a sharp pain through her abdomen, so harsh that it wrenched a cry of agony from her lips.