This choice: Keith wakes up in the courtyard, a ball of tentacles trapped in a quiet college. • Go Back...Chapter #2Keith alone, with some additions. by: Gimlet   Slowly Keith pulled himself from the ground, his view weaving in odd, disconcerting ways, head spinning... er... that felt... decidedly odd. Almost like multiple heads. He struggled to his feet, then things got weird. Everything shifted, like he was too many hands and feet and they all felt wrong, almost numb and extra sensitive at once. He immediately fell over.
Attempting to whip hands in front of him as he fell face first... he felt multiple slaps... everywhere. And he still landed on his face. Or maybe he did? That didn't hurt that much, and he was pretty sure that would have got him a broken nose if what seemed to happen did happen. Faceplanting onto asphalt wasn't fun.
Keith lay there, feeling deflated and just funky, trying to figure out what was going on, then a noise grabbed his attention behind him. He... shifted his vision with a snap... and saw a bird on the top of the roof... while at the same time still looking at the other side of the courtyard!
"What the hell?" He gasped, shakily. Then abruptly froze as that wasn't his voice. It was almost like he was talking through mud, and several octaves deeper than he usually spoke. He snapped his mouth shut and felt five distinct snaps.
Five mouths? This.. is ridiculous. Waving things in front of his eyes, almost looking like branches, finally came into focus, and he realized they were actually his arms. Many many arms... or... something like arms. He pulled one closer and focused, finding his viewpoint itself odd, almost like a triple image on top of one another, while at the same time sharp and in focus as he concentrated. The arm was... a tentacle. A smooth blue green column of flesh with some sort of bulbous tip. He flexed it and the tip opened, splitting like petals on a flower, four 'lips' peeling back.
Shaking badly he couldn't tear his eyes from his new 'hand' and played with the lips, unable to tear his eyes from the horrible appendage. The petals seemed very dexterous, the tips curling and twisting against one another like fingers, but between them, when he tipped the tentacle tip towards him, he saw a cavernous maw, a ribbed tube of dark red flesh, pulsing slightly with a disturbing rhythm, vanishing into the dank depths of the tentacle.
Then one of his 'eyes' turned a little further and he saw another eye. It was on the end of yet another tentacle, this one just ending in an eye, no petals, the column of flesh blue green like the other, and with a pulsing eyelid of the same color. The eye ball looked disturbingly human though.
Over the next few minutes, in the dark, quiet, shadowy corners of the courtyard he took stock, shakily, trying to convince himself to not freak out. It was hard. The panic was building.
He had about twenty four tentacles radiating from a central core which was difficult to make out behind them all. Just the thought of that sent part of his mind gibbering. He had a slight fuzz, like very thin fur on him, but mostly a rubbery flesh that seemed to have no bones anywhere. He had a total of eight eye tentacles, that seemed just as strong as the others, but had no mouths, all the others had those petal like tips that opened into mouths leading all the way to his core. He was (trying) to walk on several of those, and for a moment he fastened on the weird concept of if he'd accidentally get something in his mouth just from walking on it. Instead he curled the tips up, walking on the edge behind the tip. It worked. But focusing on that didn't distract him from the general panic over his situation for long.
He could walk, though he was still clumsy, and nearly knocked over some garbage cans at one point. Gasping, he tried to not panic, tried really hard, really really hard.  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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