CHAPTER 1
Hic !Bang !Bang !Crash !. Gurgle-splat!. Kk-hhaack! Glug… cough-cough-ack! Hhh-wheeze. "Hhh-aaaaah… hhh-uf", he panted as his heart rate stabilized. 'what the', he exclaimed finally taking in his surroundings. The stasis chamber was huge, no ginormous. Frankly everything around him was huge. "where the heck did they put me now", he said grudgingly.
"Hey I'm not doing this you fuckers", he shouted only to be met with expansive silence. He unfurled his wings, spraying water across the chamber, then launched himself upward.
The air inside the chamber felt heavy and humid, like a literal physical weight against his feathers as Thomas beat his wings to gain altitude. The ceiling was a distant, ribbed expanse of steel and shadow, miles away from the glass floor he had just taken of from.
As he cleared the upper rim of the stasis pod, a low-frequency thrum began to vibrate through his chest. A sound so deep it felt more like an earthquake than a noise. From behind a massive structural pillar, a shape emerged that scared him to his gut.
"What the fuck did they put inside here with me", he thought as a nightmare of yellow and black chitin, with a body the size of a freight train made eye contact with him.
Its multifaceted eyes, each lens reflecting the dim industrial lights like a thousand tiny mirrors, locked onto his movement. Thomas didn't want to wait for formal introduction and flapped his wings and took off.
Frantic, he scanned the wall, the wall was so big he could see the seams on the walls which were usually invisible. But then again nothing about this was normal.
Looking back he saw that the behemoth was still following him. The creature's legs were barbed with hooked hairs as thick as spears, and the sound of its wings made Thomas's bones shiver . the behemoth let out a high-pitched chitter that echoed off the cold steel.
He flew with everything he had, his lungs burning. He reached the vent just as the mandibles of the insect threatened to cut him in half. He scrambled through the slats, his wings scraping against the grime-slicked metal, and tumbled into the dark, narrow tunnel.
The air in the duct was thick with the scent of ozone and ancient dust, He pressed his face against the second grate, peering into the world beyond. "what the fuck", he exclaimed as he came to the harrowing realization that he was not in a giant room made for a test, he was just tiny.
The realization hit Thomas like a physical blow, more jarring than the crash that had woken him. He stared through the metal slats, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the grate. His breath came in ragged, jagged hitches, but it wasn't fear anymore, it was a hot, bubbling acid rising in his throat. He looked down at his hands, then at the iridescent span of the wings tucked against his back.
"You bastards," he whispered, his voice cracking. "You absolute fucking monsters." He exclaimed. He leaned his forehead against the cold steel of the vent, a single, hot tear carving a path through the grime on his cheek. The memories resurfaced like debris in a storm: the sterile white lights of the lab, the smell of antiseptic, and the muffled screams of his mother as they dragged him away. He had been a child when they started "improving" him.
They said the wings were a gift, a way to soar above the limitations of a dying world. But they hadn't mentioned this. They hadn't mentioned that they would turn him into a literal specimen, a pocket-sized toy to be observed and played with.
The grief in Thomas's chest was quickly being suffocated by a cold, hard resolve. He wiped the tears away, leaving streaks of soot across his face. He began to pull himself away from the grate, ready to find a way down from this metallic highway, when a flicker of movement caught his eye. Then a figure came out of the shadows
Thomas froze, his heart hammering against his ribs. It was a girl.