She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and leapt from the diving board, gliding down and landing a tad less gracefully than she'd have hoped. The water looked murkier as she swam up and she wondered if some of the lights might have blown when her eyes were shut.
As she surfaced she found that she wasn't in the Marston Bradrow Public Swimming Pool & Entertainment Centre, she was in fact not even in the swimming pool she'd jumped into. Instead of cheerful caricatures of local celebrities made to look like fish and neon blue tiles on every possible surface, she was treading water in some sort of raised canal and was surrounded by countless others.
They seemed to form some kind of maze and she was unfortunate enough to have no clue where she was or which way the centre was. She didn't even know why she would want to reach the centre but it seemed like as good a place as any to start.
Before she could debate between swimming there and stepping out of the canals, a tendril that she'd assumed was some kind of pondweed lashed out and flung her onto the land below. She struck the tiles (the same neon blue as the pool she was supposed to be in) with a loud crack and through the pain that seared across her spine she heard something wet shuffling towards her.
Whatever it was, it was muttering to itself and closing in fast. She rolled over and stumbled to her knees, keeping crouched down whilst trying to peer over the canals to see what was coming and more importantly, where from. The vaulted ceiling of her current location echoed the sounds just enough to make it impossible to find their source.
On her fourth meerkat-like attempt at peering over the canals she saw a bald and wrinkled head on the other side. She ducked back down and began to scuttle away in the opposite direction, hovering just around the corner of a three-way junction to see if this stranger might be able to help her.
As she waited, she felt one of her feet starting to slip on something far wetter than the surrounding tiles and she made the mistake of looking down... and along.. and up as her eyes followed a gruesome trail of bloody handprints with a light scattering of viscera and large swathes of red where someone- or something - had been attacked and dragged into the same water she'd been thrown from.
Whilst she'd been quietly panicking, the muttering person was now close enough that she could hear exactly what they were saying and, more importantly, get a quick enough look at their long webbed hands and bloodstained overalls.
She made her choice then and there to head for the outskirts of the maze, avoiding the humanish person, and hope that it would lead her back to Marston Bradrow or anywhere with a working phone. Before she could plot her route though, she had to wash the blood from her feet so she wouldn't leave a trail but judging by the way the water rippled if she looked at it for too long, this might be more challenging than she'd first thought.
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