title: Ropes aliases: [] tags: [FA] author: [SpeckLaz] id: [43966412] date: 星期六, 十一月 12日 2022, 12:16:45 凌晨 modified: 星期六, 十一月 12日 2022, 12:52:34 凌晨
[TOC]
Ropes
I've shrunk to a ridiculously tiny size and inside of something...wonder what this weird landscape is... why's it smell like my friend a bit?
With the light of morning gleaming through the window, a square patch of light fell on Laz, waking him from sleep. As he came to, for one reason or another, he couldn’t exactly recall how he had gotten where he was.
A cross-hatch pattern surrounded him in every direction. The area away from the light disappeared into the inky black. He pushed down against the rope he was on. It gave, and had a
natural softness to it. Those ropes stretched on for quite a distance in all directions, with a ceiling of ropes above.
There were no immediate clues showing where he was. Laz stood, disinterested in sticking around in the small depression. The ground under him shifted. He fell with a bounce, his snout pressing into the rope on landing. It had a distinct smell to it: like someone’s personal scent. There was a familiarity to it, but nothing unpleasant or overpowering.
Laz decided it would be best to head in the better-lit direction of wherever he was. The rope's give matched the difficulty of walking through snow. Every step calculated. Every step considered. The softness below his feet became firmer. The material was more worn the further he continued.
After several minutes of walking, Laz crested the top of a particularly steep hill. It often required him to gain a hold on the rope that was several times his size in width. Scrambling as best he could remember, a skill from his time in the High Sierras. Reaching the top did not provide any further clarification. Unlike the High Sierras, where a glacial valley carved by a sinuous river was the reward, it was another wall.
A wall of ropes. The same ropes. Arching back over him. They formed into the ceiling he recognized from the beginning of his traverse.
Laz looked back, realizing the only way to go was into the shadowy realm behind him. But there was a genuine unease that raced through him. Something was not right, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. The usual rescue concept of “stay put, don’t get any more lost” didn’t make sense. He currently was somewhere with a clear, finite area. It felt contained.
The creaking of wood echoed through the air. A shuffle of some material against itself followed. Caught off guard, the dragon jumbled his feet and slipped. He tumbled down the rope he was standing on and into the depression he had worked his way out of.
He barreled straight into a frayed patch of the rope. The lines catching his scaled body in a tangle, enveloping him with a hold that stopped his descent. The strain put on himself from the sudden stop would be leaving bruises.
Attempting to move, Laz found that he was bound. He tried to reach for his pocket and see if his trusty knife was there. A sharp sound of something moving in the distance. The air crackled. The sound increased in volume until it ended in an earth-shattering crescendo. Whipping his head around, Laz saw the dark area moving on its own. The hills smoothed out into a tube. It angled upward. The kink in the material was brisk with its approach to where Laz was.
A renewed struggle did nothing but spend more energy. Lifted with the rest of the world he was now trapped in, air whistled in through the holes between the ropes. With a jarring stop, Laz looked up to see that the tube did indeed have an ending. An even higher ceiling was above it, one that was a color that he recognized. The appearance of the face of his Bernard dog friend, Bern, rocked his thoughts. His huge face appeared to be an incredible distance away. Laz couldn’t tell if Bern had recognized him. The dog wore a face painted with the drowsy fog of sleep.
An interruption at the ending of the tube: a looming paw slid over the edge. White toes with black, bulbous pads and blunt claws rising out of the fur on the ends. He could no longer see the dog's face. He was now looking ahead of himself. With toes aligned with the sock, his attention was no longer needed. Laz’s stomach dropped immediately. A torrential surge of adrenaline. One of his leg muscles tensed so hard it cramped. Realization plowed through him: He was tiny, too tin, inside of Bern’s sock, and that sock was being worn.
In no time Bern's toes scrunched together and plunged downwards. They were on a direct path to Laz. Now seeing his struggle as life and death, the cramped leg meant nothing. Laz’s mind switched off, and survival turned on. This new controller of his mind decided that there would be no respite until he was either free or dead. The fabric of the sock groaned as the massive paw stretched it. The toes gave a small wiggle. There was an uneasy, echoing ruffle of fur between those toes as they slid against themselves.
Time was running out the closer and closer those toes came. Laz continued to struggle. Then he had a moment of victory. He managed to get his left arm free. In time to see those toes splay as they sailed over and beyond him. The claw tips were like blunted ends of missiles. Those pads were dark continents of craggy flesh that flexed. The white fur was stunning, putting the finest of clouds to shame.
Getting himself back to the task at hand, Laz disregarded the paw’s ball pad dropping down on him. The air around him began to whip. He managed further success. His right arm was now free. Both arms made quick work of untangling his legs. The mixed roar of air-through-fur and fur-on-sock reached a deafening climax. The heat from Bern’s body made its presence known. Small snaps and crackles, the discharge of tiny amounts of static electricity, threatened.
Laz looked up in time to see the ball pad dropping faster. His demise was arriving.
“No! No! NO!” he yelled, putting his arms up in a futile attempt to stop the raw power of the paw’s dainty placement into the sock. The powerful winds of the paw’s descent dropped onto Laz. The ball pad compressed those winds outward. Completely free of the frayed fuzz, he felt himself lifted off of the sock. He spiraled about, becoming completely disoriented. Resigning himself to becoming a smear underpaw by an innocent friend of his, he took in a final, deep breath. The air was a sweet mixture of Bern’s natural scent and the scent that had lingered on the fabric of the sock. He felt peaceful. He forgave Bern.
An explosion ripped around Laz. Rough stalks of fur assaulted him as the paw settled onto the ground completely. Pressure increased. First, a gradual gain. Then, exponential. Laz was not going to be moving from where he was. He had enough strength to take the most restricted of breaths. What little light he could see hinted that he was in the tufts of fur between the pads of Bern’s toes and ball.
There was a sound. That of the toes as they wiggled. It shook the tiny dragon to his core. Pressure relieved, then increased, then relieved again. He sighed, a lucky break, finally. Several moments passed before a titanic thud. It came from well outside of the sock Laz was in. His thoughts ran to the other paw, also socked, crashing into the floor.
A potent force of movement made Laz feel as if his eyeballs were about to evacuate his skull. Then a downward acceleration. As that second motion occurred, the sock fabric that was far away came screaming into the top of the fur. Air whistling, screaming, once again through the rough fibers. They came up close enough to Laz that he was able to see, not well, out of a few of the holes: a shoe.
Moving towards the shoe, at that.
The fabric of the shoe and sock rubbing against each other rattled Laz. The light he had fading away as he slipped into the dark confines to experience who knows what. Rubber whimpered as the paw filled up the inside of the shoe. When the movement stopped, there was darkness. Answered with the distinct sound of nylon sliding over steel eyelets: laces tied.
The heat was already beginning to build only seconds after the paw settled into the shoe. Laz felt himself start to perspire. Or at this size, it was Bern who was beginning to sweat?
Laz pushed himself deeper into the fluff. That forest was only the tiny spot that occupied the area between the massive, crushing pads. It frightened Laz, but enthralled him with the potential adventure. He set himself up for what was going to be a long day. One that he hoped would not get any worse.