80. (Bits and pieces.)

Typing this on a laptop that isn't mine. A new experience. MacBook keyboard/mouse setups suck, but I'm making due because it's pretty, and because the front-desk computer at work is a pile of refuse. Normally I'd be writing this on my own desk's computer here at the library, but I'm using it as an excuse to test out the shiny new MacBooks we're going to be loaning out to people in the near future (for in-library use only). Suffice to say the lack of a [Home] or [End] key is going to drive me batty.

A bit of the previous story (which will likely never be finished, or worked on again in any kind of serious manner) that's been bouncing around in my head. An exercise, if you will.

The guy may come to take the pretty toy away at any second, so this might not even get completed.



The Creature
When he first comes to he's alone, naked, and weak. His suit is gone, bulky as it was, and he feels exceptionally exposed. Sitting up, Thomas Viancetti holds a hand out in front of himself--it's covered in blood, but more importantly, he's two-dimensional. Or at least it looks like it is. Wincing, he reaches up and touches his eyes--correction, eye: the left one is gone, a ravaged socket marking it's previous location.

He looks around. The room, perhaps cell, he finds himself in is round, shaped like half of a squashed sphere. To his left is what may or may not be a door. It's also round, a bump maybe ten feet tall. The room itself, he guesses, is about thirty feet in diameter and twenty feet in height, but it's hard to tell with no depth perception.

The "door" emits a soft humming noise behind him, and he quickly turns, still having not risen, to face the sound. The "door" itself seems to be completely gone, and in it stands his host, or who Thomas assumes is his host.

At first, wildly, he thinks he's looking at a centaur, but soon that image is washed from his mind--the only similarity with that ancient mythic beast that the creatures before him exhibits is a basic, general shape: four legs meeting in a barrel-shaped torso, from the front of which sprouts a more man-like torso. The creature has four arms, each sprouting from shoulders in a roughly human-like location, and four eyes, arranged in a square on the creature's face, just above what looks like a mouth--a straight cleavage in the flesh of the face apparent only from a thin line of darkness. The skin is a dark shade of olive-green and resembles, vaguely, that of a frog or other amphibian. On each of the four feet, which can be found at the end of long, muscular legs jointed in the middle like those of a human, are four toes, two in front and two to the rear, where a human heel would be. Each is devoid of nails. Each of the four arms joints not once but twice, and terminates in a four-fingered hand similar in design to the creature's feet, but to a more flexible degree.

Professor Viancetti tries to rise, and gets about halfway there before collapsing in pain. His leg, already hobbled by old age, cannot support him--the bone inside is shattered.